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#69657 by joshhuggins
Wed Aug 17, 2016 4:05 pm
Is this a common symbol for feet cubed? Looks like the Sq. Ft. symbol but with an additional horz. line A co-worked asked if I could add it into our fonts and symbols but I have never seen it and I can't find it used anywhere. I thought he was jerking my chain for a sec but he seems serious.
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#69658 by MtnArch
Wed Aug 17, 2016 5:17 pm
I've never seen that used in all of my years here on the left coast. It sounds like a convention created by a previous employer that has simply carried over.
#69659 by David A. Giesselman
Wed Aug 17, 2016 5:31 pm
That makes no sense. The SqFt symbol, as I understand it, was derived as a square with the engineering shorthand for "Foot" (a single ') drawn through it. Adding a horizontal hash through the middle in no way imparts a sense of a 3rd dimension. In my twisted, little nerd mind this would make far more sense.
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Dave
#69667 by Ted B
Sat Aug 20, 2016 2:15 pm
I haven't seen that used on a drawing in years; feet, feet-squared, feet-cubed. Here in the Northeast, it was typically used in pencil sketching and long-hand legal-pad calculations decades ago as a shorthand before calculators, spreadsheets and CAD. Usually with the vertical stroke longer than the horizontal to avoid it looking like a square-target symbol. Generally it wasn't considered "proper" for final construction drawings, and I think it died-off once CAD took over from 'draughting' and French & Vierck.

Like lots of the old drafting-conventions; if early Autocad didn't support it, it stopped being used.

The same with symbols not supported by common fonts. I'm continually-peeved by the number of .ttf and .otf fonts that don't have the proper degree/ordinal glyph, the diameter glyph, or a proper "+/-" glyph. ...Even the 'architectural' or engineering-styled fonts.
#69673 by joshhuggins
Mon Aug 22, 2016 12:10 pm
Thanks Ted, at least I can let him know he's not crazy. ;) Always enjoy learning something new about architectural drafting history. Not sure I will be adding it at this point since it seems most people won't know what it is.
Ted B wrote:The same with symbols not supported by common fonts. I'm continually-peeved by the number of .ttf and .otf fonts that don't have the proper degree/ordinal glyph, the diameter glyph, or a proper "+/-" glyph. ...Even the 'architectural' or engineering-styled fonts.
I just got done spending 3 days modifying a "Architectural" font that was missing most of the common drafting symbols. While digging thru the Latin Unicode character standards I found there are specified characters for almost all of the most common symbols which is nice. We are getting ready to make the jump to all TTF for our files since they just seem to export better than our old ARCWY2GP.SHX font. That's what started this thread, I wanted to make sure I added in any symbol characters we will need. I was surprised I couldn't find a standard symbol list in the Arch. Graphic Standards or a few of our other standards books. :?
#69678 by Ted B
Mon Aug 22, 2016 10:34 pm
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 it used to be a parallel and separate honored profession to Architecture.

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 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]

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