GD&T symbols themselves - is there any official guidance about their shape and proportions?

[Nescius]

Put plainly, I ask, who's in charge of the shapes and proportions of the various symbols (ASME)? Perhaps only the typesetters of the 14.5 standard actually know .

I need to recreate them all from scratch. Of course, they're easy to draw accurately enough for any practical purpose, but having the "official" proportions (if they exist) would be ideal.

 

[Burunduk]

ASME Y14.5-2018 or 2009,
NONMANDATORY APPENDIX C
FORM, PROPORTION, AND COMPARISON OF SYMBOLS

 

[Nescius]

Thanks, Burunduk. Google failed me; as you'd expect, my searches were overwhelmed by regular GD&T content.

However, this very thread already shows up in a Google search for "gd&t symbol proportions". That's both amazing and a little creepy.

 

[Burunduk]

I guess that google doesn't have the answers for everything. Well, maybe now it has

 

[ctopher]

I'm curious why you need to redraw them?

Chris, CSWP
SolidWorks
ctophers home

 

[Nescius]

It's a very low priority project for me, but I'd like to be able to seamlessly prepare written documents with symbols, feature control frames, etc. (inline with text, in figures, tables, wherever)

So, I'm building a LaTeX package of shortcuts to render GD&T symbols with the TikZ package. This will allow visually perfect, scalable symbols to be placed anywhere in a document by only typing a few words. I'd wager that somebody has already done similar work, but I want my own system.

If you are unfamiliar with "LaTeX", let's say it's an ecosystem/language to generate a document by describing the formatting and content of the document in plain text, using a bunch of code. The code is compiled/rendered into a document, not unlike how a browser reads HTML written in plain text in order to display a website. TikZ is a package of tools for drawing stuff in that ecosystem.

If I'm honest, the task is at least 50% "just for fun"; I'm a LaTeX amateur who finds the ecosystem absolutely fascinating.

 

[Burunduk]

"(inline with text, in figures, tables, wherever)"

The "GDT" font available in every office program also allows this.
I suppose that you are after something that has some advantages over it?

 

[Nescius]

I want complete control over the aesthetics and very few constraints on how I make use of the symbols.

The sky is the limit. Go wild. Any conceivable special diagram is possible because you're literally describing an image with typed code.

Again, though, it's also for fun.

 

[3DDave]

Glyphs from various sources are not necessarily reliable.

Per the Unicode Consortium:

Fonts
The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to be
expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a number
of different font designers, who own the rights to the fonts.

from:

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf

I am unsure if these are loaded with Office - I see there are fonts available from several sources, including ASME, which has not updated to include the 2018 version which would add dynamic profile.

https://cstools.asme.org/csconnect/CommitteePages.cfm?Committee=c64041000&Action=40068

They recommend seeing the page by Peter Kanold, the font creator (The ASME link to Kanold is dead.)

The Peter Kanold current page is

https://peterkanold.com/fonts

and includes the 2018 version.

Peter Kanold also has a feature control frame creation/editing tool, on the page in the line above. This includes the fonts.

 

[3DDave]

I just installed the new version and was reminded that it only outputs bitmaps; to get the correct output in other applications requires being able to mess with the line spacing inside paragraphs to get the fractional characters to line up.

This info is in the help file for the FCF font generator.

 

[Nescius]

Interesting, 3DDave. That tool may be useful for some quick and dirty image generation. It could be a reasonable alternative to building FCFs in a CAD program and exporting as an image.

As you point out, though, using the font outside of that application can turn into a massive kluge. That's the nature of fonts; they and the tools that use them are built for the 99% use case. (It's probably closer to 99.9999%)