While CAD has so-many advantages, it's taken much of the "art" and the "craft" out of drafting. There's little finesse or style in most most CAD-drafters' work today, and little concern for the printed page anymore. People forget that Drafting used to be a parallel and separate honored profession to Architecture and Engineering.
I'll admit that one of the petty reasons I first was attracted to Datacad was the "overshoots" and the availability of different line-weights on the same layer compared-to Autocad in the very-early days. I used to attend CAD demos and bring-up "overshoots", and they'd look at me like I was a Unicorn. Most CAD drawings were so crude graphically, even though they were clean, neat and correctable. And plotters could only support a few pen-weights via inserting different-weight steel-tipped pens or felt-markers.
I learned to draft in the early-70s in pencil on vellum with French & Vierch on the drawing board. And in architecture school we had to present ink-drawings on 18" yellow-trace or 24x36" drafting-vellum in the original; no blueprints, no engineering copier. And clear freehand sketching on yellow-trace with a marker of a 'sign-pen' was a developed art. And you hand-lettered everything -- or used the LeRoy lettering machine -- in India Ink. If you were an Architecture major, you got shipped-off to the Civil Engineering Department for one or two semesters of "proper" drafting instruction with the civil engineering geeks.
Now it's all crap. I'm embarrassed for the profession when I get drawings from an engineer or another architect. Total computer-drawn crap.
- No line-weights, no visual contrasts.
- No clear dimensions or arrows -- with lots of dimensions missing. (Don't Scale off the Drawing!!)
- Crappy cross-hatching out of laziness.
- Poor or unimaginative fonts, or variety in font-size by class-of-text; Title, body-text, dimensions, labels, etc
- "Professional Drawings" created using the default-settings and the simplex.SHX font.
Mindless drivel... Crap... Cut-and-paste garbage... Dreck...
[/steps off soapbox]
I'll admit that one of the petty reasons I first was attracted to Datacad was the "overshoots" and the availability of different line-weights on the same layer compared-to Autocad in the very-early days. I used to attend CAD demos and bring-up "overshoots", and they'd look at me like I was a Unicorn. Most CAD drawings were so crude graphically, even though they were clean, neat and correctable. And plotters could only support a few pen-weights via inserting different-weight steel-tipped pens or felt-markers.
I learned to draft in the early-70s in pencil on vellum with French & Vierch on the drawing board. And in architecture school we had to present ink-drawings on 18" yellow-trace or 24x36" drafting-vellum in the original; no blueprints, no engineering copier. And clear freehand sketching on yellow-trace with a marker of a 'sign-pen' was a developed art. And you hand-lettered everything -- or used the LeRoy lettering machine -- in India Ink. If you were an Architecture major, you got shipped-off to the Civil Engineering Department for one or two semesters of "proper" drafting instruction with the civil engineering geeks.
Now it's all crap. I'm embarrassed for the profession when I get drawings from an engineer or another architect. Total computer-drawn crap.
- No line-weights, no visual contrasts.
- No clear dimensions or arrows -- with lots of dimensions missing. (Don't Scale off the Drawing!!)
- Crappy cross-hatching out of laziness.
- Poor or unimaginative fonts, or variety in font-size by class-of-text; Title, body-text, dimensions, labels, etc
- "Professional Drawings" created using the default-settings and the simplex.SHX font.
Mindless drivel... Crap... Cut-and-paste garbage... Dreck...
[/steps off soapbox]