Labels In Uppercase Or Looking For An All Caps Blueprint Font


Athenian_CAD
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Anyone have a recommendation for where I can find a blueprint font that only uses uppercase?  Or maybe there's a better way to accomplish what I want.

Camera labels come up with names like "Camera 1" and I want that to be "CAMERA 1" without futzing about with it.  I can't find a way to force labels like this to be all caps using text styles.

Am I missing something?

I did find this post on the old forum, the description sounds like maybe what I want but for layout box labels, and the video link doesn't work anymore, can anyone elaborate?  I've never used custom macros or Ruby with Chief.

http://www.chieftalk.com/showthread.php?62560-Change-Macro-to-all-CAPS

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This isn't possible for cameras because they are not tied to the Ruby console in any way. But it is possible for anything else, assuming you don't want to change the automatic label.

 

For example you could create a macro like this:

post-44-0-29804600-1408552592_thumb.png

 

And use it as the label for the object like this:

post-44-0-35211800-1408552601_thumb.png

 

The result should be the same label as before but in all uppercase.

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It is my suspicion that the tradition of using all caps in drafting stems from the difficulty in producting legible lower case characters by hand.

 

I'm curious about the continuation of preferring all caps in CAD.

 

Is it a matter of that is the way it has always been done or are there other good reasons to continue using all caps that I'm not aware of?

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Good question.  I suppose a lot of it is tradition, but there may also be issues like efficient use of space and font size.  All capitals fill the space more efficiently, whereas upper case and lower case basically forces your minimum size text to be based on the lower case.  That makes the upper case unnecessarily large and white space where you don't want or desire it.  There may be just a simple aesthetic aspect of it too.

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Lowercase was never an option in design school.  Hours upon hours with that darned lettering guide developing my own "style" (mandatory exercise), and for what?  So now I use fonts developed by some 18 year-old in Bulgaria who has never hand lettered a sheet of velum.  Ok, rant over.

 

My preferences, and it is aesthetic and legibility, are uppercase News Gothic or Gill Sans MT. 

 

jon

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I would like to be able to set Upper Case as a default within any given Text Style and/or Label. IOW, make it possible for us to specify what we want to be Upper Case and what we want to be Uppercase/Lowercase.

 

Typically, I like general text (the 1/8" Default Text - whatever font I select- usually Chief Blueprint) to be all Uppercase. That's the body of notes, etc in the CDs. Larger Text such as View Names, etc I have come to be comfortable with as Uppercase/Lowercase - mostly because it allows more characters within a given width.

 

Note:  Just for readability reasons alone, I don't want anything less than 1/10" in height on the final printed sheet.  I actually prefer 1/8" but since the computer fonts are more legible than hand drafting I can accept 1/10" as the bottom limit.

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This setting to uppercase is long overdue - surely this is an easy default setting, to cover all sittuations so that labes both in Layout and in plan can be set to to whatever case yoy prefer to work with.

Lets hope Chief Architect picks this one up quickly.

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It is my suspicion that the tradition of using all caps in drafting stems from the difficulty in producting legible lower case characters by hand.

 

I'm curious about the continuation of preferring all caps in CAD.

 

Is it a matter of that is the way it has always been done or are there other good reasons to continue using all caps that I'm not aware of?

 

My guess is that back in the day of offices where you'd have many people drafting by hand on the same project, it was easier to get a reasonably consistent look in lettering by using all caps. I can't think of a good reason today to use all caps, other than it's easier to demonstrate that you're complying with a minimum letter size requirement to the building department. (which is often set at 1/8")

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I don't think uppercase has ever been written in stone - it's just the easiest way to teach consistent lettering technique. I have a copy of the 1932 edition of Architectural Graphic Standards. Drawing notations are hand lettered in sentence case (though select words are capitalized). Drawing titles and headings are title case. Ching uses sentence case in most of his published references. My boss, who may be described as an "artsy fartsy" architect, loves all lower case.

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