Typography on a sheet
Fourteen faces, sizes in real millimetres, and a sample of every one as you set it.
4 min read
Sizes are millimetres on paper
Every size on a sheet is millimetres on the printed page: a 3 mm heading measures 3 mm with a scale rule. Set them with the arrows or type them, and a life-size sample of the actual text shows beside each field.
| Class | What it sets |
|---|---|
| Headings | Panel headings, SURVEY NOTES, the title block heading |
| Labels | Field labels, DRAWING TITLE, CLIENT |
| Values | The words you typed into those fields |
| Notes | The numbered survey notes |
The faces
Fourteen: three PDF standard faces that need no embedding, and eleven open-licence families shipped with the product and embedded in the PDF. Each one shows itself in the picker with a line about what it is for.
- Arimo, metric-compatible with Arial, the safe plan face.
- Roboto Condensed, Archivo Narrow, Oswald, narrow, for long titles in a title block.
- Open Sans, Source Sans 3, IBM Plex Sans, Inter, body text and notes.
- IBM Plex Mono, JetBrains Mono, Cousine, monospaced, for coordinate schedules.
About SHX fonts
The SHX faces a desktop CAD office knows, simplex, romans, isocp, are a proprietary format Backsight will not parse or embed. The closest honest equivalents are offered under their own names.
Presentation scaling
A drawing styled to read on screen at 1:500 does not read on paper at 1:2000. The presentation multipliers scale markers, their labels and line weights on the plot only, the drawing itself is never touched, so the same drawing can carry a dense working plot and a clean presentation sheet.
Read next
- Sheets: setting one up and plotting itA sheet at a real scale, with a title block, a legend and your logo: then a PDF you can prove.
- Your logo and a legend on the sheetPut your artwork where you want it, and add a legend that lists only what the drawing uses.
- Sheet templates and your office standardFive compositions to start from, and how to save your own as the default.
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