Opinions wanted: CTB vs STB

[CCarleton]

Hi All,

I want some opinions on CTB vs STB in regards to company standards; there are no wrong answers here. Our company has grown over the years and a reckoning is upon us about trying to nail down standards, documentation, and uniformity between offices as teams grow and one big debate that has come up is STB vs CTB.

Strictly from a company perspective (ie: ignoring external clients that may have their own standards that will govern)
-Do you prefer CTB or STB more? Why?
-Do you believe a company should be either entirely STB or entirely CTB or can be both?
-Do you believe a company can function entirely off one (maybe two) tables or needs multiple to cover any specific needs such as different department, office or state specific needs, etc
-If possible share your STB/CTB file design, or in the case of STB, at least style count. In regards to STB I am curious to see how many styles other firms are running with as the main draw to STB seems to be having a concise table to manage.

The issue I have seen in our discussions is that the STB tables being used by other teams on STB is rather bloated. The smallest STB table I've seen is over 70 styles and this seems to defeat the purpose of going STB; the cause of the style quantity is done via referencing screening and lineweight such as "100% - 0.15" and "75% - 0.15". There are 9 screen varieties and each screen group has different weights attached which leads to the quantity of styles and while 70 is less than 255 styles it is still too many to manage if you ask me. Plus I've seen people duplicate styles to plot it in color (ie: 100% - 0.15 - Purple). I believe a comfortable style count should land somewhere in the 5-20 range at most. My department switched over to STB, but nuked the lineweight component of the styles (it felt redundant), reduced screening options down to every 20% and then also added in a color option; this put us at 12 styles in total. I could see another variation where you created named intention styles such as Proposed, Existing - to remain, Existing - to demo, and maybe a few others.

My opinion is I do not really care if we land on STB or CTB; both work fine, and have pros/cons to them so as long as either is intelligently set up. I believe we should either go one or the other and every department that uses CAD must use a company specific table. There shouldn't be a need for a Development.STB, Water.STB, Aviation.STB, etc. But again, this is where you come in. Some people argue they should be left to their own devices because there is not always a lot of overlap between teams, but the team that is discussing standards (with management) is afraid that this leads to scalability issues because the standard becomes blurred and difficult to understand for newcomers to the company.

Thanks!