What type of letters are used in aero-engineering when hand writing?

Which type of letters is rule to use in aero-engineering when hand writing?
All capitals-block letters, cursive, upper and lower case-block letters. .?

John Mcrain said:

Which type of letters is rule to use in aero-engineering when hand writing?
All capitals-block letters, cursive, upper and lower case-block letters. .?

Specifically in Aero Engineering? I don't know if it's different there, but many engineers use "Small Capital Letters" (all capital letters with the first letter of each word a larger size to help visually set apart the words)...

https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/small-caps

https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/4c05fba0ac3fc11/C.Small-caps.gif

berkeman said:

Specifically in Aero Engineering? I don't know if it's different there, but many engineers use "Small Capital Letters" (all capital letters with the first letter of each word a larger size to help visually set apart the words)...

https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/small-caps

https://cdncms.fonts.net/images/4c05fba0ac3fc11/C.Small-caps.gif

View attachment 269214

What is reason for that,why they don't use block "printed" letters?
You think that readabilty is better at upper case?

John Mcrain said:

What is reason for that,why they don't use block "printed" letters?
You think that readabilty is better at upper case?

Capital letters have been standard for many fields, documents and drawings in the past. This includes mechanical engineering drawings, hand-written notes/documents in the military, law enforcement, EMS, and other places. For me, "small caps" is easier to read than all caps the same size, since it sets off words better.

Others probably know of actual standards for printing and writing in engineering...

https://inkfactorystudio.com/blog/simple-tips-improve-handwriting/


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

In professional documents, a commonly preferred alternative to all caps text is the use of small caps to emphasise key names or acronyms (for example, Text in Small Caps), or the use of italics or (more rarely) bold.[7] In addition, if all caps must be used it is customary to slightly widen the spacing between the letters, by around 10% of the point height. This practice is known as tracking or letterspacing.[8] Some digital fonts contain alternative spacing metrics for this purpose.[9]

But keep in mind that for folks who don't regularly write/read in all caps, the style can be harder to read (see the same Wikipedia article). Also, in discussion forums like the PF, all capital letters can be viewed as yelling, so they are to be avoided.

John Mcrain said:

when hand writing?

I suppose you're asking about labels and other brief explanatory text on hand-drawn diagrams?

jtbell said:

I suppose you're asking about labels and other brief explanatory text on hand-drawn diagrams?

I ask for text,for example you mast hand write on paper definiton od lift,drag,wing area ,describe some phenomen etc..
Why do you ask?

berkeman said:

Capital letters have been standard for many fields, documents and drawings in the past. This includes mechanical engineering drawings, hand-written notes/documents in the military, law enforcement, EMS, and other places. For me, "small caps" is easier to read than all caps the same size, since it sets off words better.

Others probably know of actual standards for printing and writing in engineering...

But lower block letters are use almost everywhere ,100% internet,100% books,100%magazines,accounts etc etc.

I find all caps hard to read because every word has same rectangular shape,easiest to read for me is lower block letters and hardiest is cursive.

All caps is super when is just one word,like on button,antention,sign,tehnical drawing etc but disaster in text..

That's a wall-o-text, which is hard to read no matter what...


But yes, as it says in the Wikipedia article, if you aren't used to reading all-caps or all-small-caps, it can be harder to read. I'm just saying that I use small caps because that's what my dad used in his military notes, and it's what I've seen on mechanical drawings and sketches, and what I've seen in law enforcement and EMS.

I think your question is a good one -- since you are wanting to get into Aero engineering, it will be important to learn early if you will be using caps or small caps for your hand drawings and notes. Since you don't like it currently, it would take practice to get more comfortable with it.

Paging @jrmichler @boneh3ad @Astronuc @anorlunda

I've not see All Caps, except in drawings, schematics and telegraphs. I have a set of drawings from work, and the print is ALL CAPS, of different sizes, depending on use, e.g., drawing title, notes, labels. I believe the use of ALL CAPS is used to avoid ambiguity. On each drawing, the only use if lower case is in the title of the institution producing the drawings.

I have some old NACA/NASA reports. The title pages are usually capitalized letters, except the word 'by' in reference to the author(s), the text is normal sentence usage, but the diagrams, plots and schematics use ALL CAPS, except the figure captions are usually 'Sentence case'.

As for handwriting, I almost never do, because my handwriting is terrible. I tend to print (scribble mostly), with mostly lower case, but I know a few folks show print large and small caps, but that seems rare.

John Mcrain said:

I ask for text,for example you mast hand write on paper definiton od lift,drag,wing area ,describe some phenomen etc..

Do you mean written answers on university exams and assignments? In that case you should use whatever the graders / markers prefer, if they indeed have a preference.

I taught physics (not engineering) for many years, and graded all my tests and assignments myself. Most of my students, and I myself, used some form of block letters with the usual mixture of lower case and capitals like in most printed books. Some used all-caps. Some even used cursive. I didn't care, provided that I could read it.

All caps and small caps have for years been the drafting standard and that has made its way into the handwriting of many engineers, I'd wager. But drafting by hand hasn't been common practice for years and hasn't been taught in engineering curricula for decades now, so I would be willing to bet that the all caps/small caps way of life is probably dying out in favor of the "CAD program default" font.

For me, almost all of my writing is in just normal text. Plain capital-and-lowercase text. It would be weird to write technical papers and course notes in anything else.

The hand-drawn Engineering and Architectural drawings if seen and made used the all-caps block or sometimes the small-caps block approach. They have much higher proportion of straight lines in the letters than lower case does, making them faster to draw... and easier to read than a hurried cursive.

An Architect I worked with, drew the letter verticals using a 30-60-90 triangle against the drafting machine to give true verticals. The rest of the lines were either curved or approximately horizontal; giving a slight impression of cursive. Crazy as it sounds, it was a quite readable font style... along with a bit of 'character' or style thrown in.

Cheers,
Tom

boneh3ad said:

All caps and small caps have for years been the drafting standard and that has made its way into the handwriting of many engineers, I'd wager. But drafting by hand hasn't been common practice for years and hasn't been taught in engineering curricula for decades now, so I would be willing to bet that the all caps/small caps way of life is probably dying out in favor of the "CAD program default" font.

For me, almost all of my writing is in just normal text. Plain capital-and-lowercase text. It would be weird to write technical papers and course notes in anything else.

So engineers write even huge amount of text in all caps/small caps?
What is you "normal text" cursive or printed letters like in all books?
Yes in tehnical drawing all caps are allways used,but my question is more related to text in technical papers.

berkeman said:

That's a wall-o-text, which is hard to read no matter what...

View attachment 269229
But yes, as it says in the Wikipedia article, if you aren't used to reading all-caps or all-small-caps, it can be harder to read. I'm just saying that I use small caps because that's what my dad used in his military notes, and it's what I've seen on mechanical drawings and sketches, and what I've seen in law enforcement and EMS.

I think your question is a good one -- since you are wanting to get into Aero engineering, it will be important to learn early if you will be using caps or small caps for your hand drawings and notes. Since you don't like it currently, it would take practice to get more comfortable with it.

Paging @jrmichler @boneh3ad @Astronuc @anorlunda

Problem is my cursive is terrible,with printed letters I am very slow and all caps is hard to read in text.

Tom.G said:

. They have much higher proportion of straight lines in the letters than lower case does, making them faster to draw...

Cheers,
Tom

Fastest writing is in cursive but readability is terrible

John Mcrain said:

So engineers write even huge amount of text in all caps/small caps?
What is you "normal text" cursive or printed letters like in all books?
Yes in tehnical drawing all caps are allways used,but my question is more related to text in technical papers.

I only use cursive for signatures. I can't even promise that I could legibly write a paragraph in cursive anymore because the second I stopped being forced to do that, I stopped.

I don't know of anyone who writes long tomes in all/small caps. Small handwritten notes and sketches? Sure. Most "writing" is done on a computer, though. No one writes a technical paper by hand. Stretching all the way back to the oldest technical paper I have, which is "An Experimental Investigation of the Circumstances Which Determine Whether the Motion of Water Shall Be Direct or Sinuous, and of the Law of Resistance in Parallel Channels" by Osborne Reynolds in 1883, it's all just standard text.

boneh3ad said:

No one writes a technical paper by hand.

Agreed. When I first started working in industry, I was expected to handwrite a draft of a report and hand it to a secretary who would type the report, and that was the way the managers had done it. At university, we had personal computers and work stations, so I had become accustomed to typing drafts/reports myself. The office had a few personal computers for computation/calculations, and the secretaries had word processors. In a few years, all engineers had personal computers and ultimately the management had a network installed, so that engineers could type up a report and print it without the need to handwrite a draft and pass it to clerical staff.

We used normal text, generally similar to what one would find in a journal article.

John Mcrain said:

Fastest writing is in cursive but readability is terrible

Indeed, my handwriting is terrible, since I write quickly, and it is more or less scribble. That is the case with many scientists and engineers, but I've known some who have wonderful handwriting of almost print quality.

boneh3ad said:

Most "writing" is done on a computer, though. No one writes a technical paper by hand.

That's why I asked if the OP is talking about something like written exams in class, which often require writing a few sentences or a paragraph for a verbal (rather than mathematical) answer to a question.

jtbell said:

That's why I asked if the OP is talking about something like written exams in class, which often require writing a few sentences or a paragraph for a verbal (rather than mathematical) answer to a question.

Yes at university you must hand writing all the time, so does exist rule which letters must be used ?

John Mcrain said:

my question is more related to text in technical papers.

Technical papers are typed.

I'm trying to imagine Luftwaffe instrument panels using gothic script (blackletter). I can't do it.

John Mcrain said:

Yes at university you must hand writing all the time, so does exist rule which letters must be used ?

No one is mandating anything. Not character choice, anyway. As a professor, what I care about is: (1) can I read what they wrote and (2) did they know what they were doing.

I think most people responding here are in the US, like I am. Universities in some other countries might have more rigid standards for this sort of thing.

All caps should be reserved for acronyms. If there is any hope for publication, all caps are completely unacceptable. You should pick a respectable publication and mimic it.

As an example, here is an open-access article from the AIAA Journal that everyone should be able to access for free. The exact topic is not important to the discussion, but it is illustrative of some of the common formatting practices in technical communication documents.

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdfplus/10.2514/1.J058977

FactChecker said:

All caps should be reserved for acronyms. If there is any hope for publication, all caps are completely unacceptable. You should pick a respectable publication and mimic it.

Yeah, the OP's original question was about hand-written pages, not publications, though. That's where the caps and small-caps came up.

John Mcrain said:

Which type of letters is rule to use in aero-engineering when hand writing?
All capitals-block letters, cursive, upper and lower case-block letters. .?

Vanadium 50 said:

I'm trying to imagine Luftwaffe instrument panels using gothic script (blackletter). I can't do it.

That style is called Fraktur.

I'm reading this with my daughter who is a consulting engineer (structural) in Dallas in the house. I asked her about her company's standards, and she said everything on drawings is done in (uniform) upper case, so there is one real life data point.

My own preference was always to mix upper and lower case, but I never did drawings that had to meet a company drafting standard. My work was always just to illustrate my own work.

In any field where acronyms are used constantly, (that includes any field with military or government connections), using all upper case would be very confusing. That is true whether it is handwritten, typed, or done by publicists. Even in other fields, it makes proper names and the beginning of sentences hard to spot. It's a bad practice. I suppose you could use the large/small all-caps method if you were very careful about easily distinguishable sizes and did not have something where the text size did not otherwise vary much.

The fundamental issue here was the original question. @John Mcrain asked about hand-writing, but then later clarified that his question was about text in technical papers and books. After that, he then backtracked a bit to refocus on handwriting.

The bottom line here is the following:

• Most technical communication (books, journal articles, reports) are written on a computer and use standard text (standard capitalization rules).
• Handwriting in engineering school is generally only for solving problems (e.g. homework), not for long documents with lots of text and is generally not regulated.
• Handwriting used to be common in drafting and would typically be in all caps or small caps. Very little hand drafting occurs these days, however, so it mostly comes down to what your CAD program has enabled by default (usually all caps).

jtbell said:

I think most people responding here are in the US, like I am. Universities in some other countries might have more rigid standards for this sort of thing.

This is US forum?

It's an international forum. The US has most native English speakers, so most English-language forums have many people from the US.

berkeman said:

For me, "small caps" is easier to read than all caps the same size, since it sets off words better.

There are lots of theories about this topic,this one tell there is not true that all caps are harder to read, but I think it is personal.

https://www.blog.theteamw.com/2009/...apital-letters-are-inherently-harder-to-read/

I dont see at words like shapes, I must see clean lettes to recognize words, for example I read slow others cursive handwriting or even my if I write fast and ugly. Cursive from my doctor I cant read at all,literally.

For me not difference in read this two text, if I use stopwacth and try to read this text as fast as possible,both text I read in same time.

All CAPS:
"IT’S PARALLEL LETTER RECOGNITION, NOT WORD SHAPE — THE OLD THEORY ON WORD SHAPES COMES FROM A PSYCHOLINGUIST NAMED CATTELL WHO CAME UP WITH THAT THEORY IN 1886. THERE WAS SOME EVIDENCE FOR IT, BUT MORE RECENT RESEARCH SHOWS THAT IT IS LETTERS YOU ARE RECOGNIZING AND ANTICIPATING. YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE WORDS BY THE SHAPE OF THE WORD. YOU RECOGNIZE FAMILIAR LETTER SEQUENCES. THE RESEARCH STRONGLY SUGGESTS THAT YOU RECOGNIZE ALL THE LETTERS IN A WORD AT THE SAME TIME, AND THEN YOU USE THE RECOGNITION OF THOSE LETTERS TO RECOGNIZE THE WORD."
lowercase:
"It’s parallel letter recognition, not word shape — the old theory on word shapes comes from a psycholinguist named cattell who came up with that theory in 1886. there was some evidence for it, but more recent research shows that it is letters you are recognizing and anticipating. you don’t recognize words by the shape of the word. you recognize familiar letter sequences. the research strongly suggests that you recognize all the letters in a word at the same time, and then you use the recognition of those letters to recognize the word."
This cursive I dont understand, this is not reading it is decoding.

boneh3ad said:

• Handwriting in engineering school is generally only for solving problems (e.g. homework), not for long documents with lots of text and is generally not regulated.

It is not regulated but maybe is better to write in cursive when take notes during class, some theory suggest that.

This thread has little to do with engineering and should have been let go two years ago. Locked.