The lettering font used in text styles in landscape CAD drawings can have a very big influence on the appearance of a completed design. Many designers bemoan the loss of their particular lettering style when moving from hand drafting to CAD drafting. While it is possible to convert you own handwriting to a Windows font and use that font in your designs developed using gCADPlus, it is tedious. Many hand lettered fonts are available to gCADPlus users. Here we discuss the various factors to consider when developing a characteristic and consistent lettering style for a design practice.
Text in gCADPlus can be drawn using either CAD or Windows fonts. Many CAD fonts available in gCADPlus shown below give a ‘hand lettered’ feel. Each lettering is defined by a named style and font of the same name. All fonts here have the height set at 7 units, but note the considerable variation in height. CAD fonts are preferred in drawings because they are drawn with vectors – entities such as lines, arcs etc. – and will display crisply no matter what zoom factor is used. Text drawn with a CAD font can also be exploded into individual letters. That may have advantage when creating logos. On the other hand, Windows text is drawn as bit mapped (raster) text and may not print as crisply, especially when magnified. The advantage of using Windows fonts is that the range of fonts available is far greater than in gCADPlus, but we like to think that we have given you plenty to choose from.
Hand lettered text styles
Below are some examples of gCADPlus text styles drawn with CAD and Windows fonts.
Fonts used in lettering styles can have a big influence on the appearance of a completed design. Here we discuss the various factors to consider when creating a characteristic style for a design practice.