ARMAS, Alexia Marie L.

BSECE 1-A / DRAW 1 / Ms. R. JACOB

JULY 28, 2015

GUIDELINES FOR LETTERING

Source: http://armycommunications.tpub.com/ss0530a/ss0530a0066.htm

Guidelines serve as an aid to creating uniform lettering. Guidelines are light pencil lines that provide
the means to achieve the consistency needed for uniformity. When you apply only upper-case lettering,
you use only the base and cap guidelines. When lettering consists of upper- and lower-case letters, you
must use the cap, waist, base, and drop guidelines.

When laying out guidelines for upper- and lower-case letters, the height of upper-case lettering is 1 1/2
times the distance "A". When establishing the guideline for lettering, set a compass or divider to distance
"A" and mark the distance you have selected above and below the midline. These two marks establish the
cap line and the drop line.

Next you must locate the base and waist lines. To locate these lines, set the compass or divider to 1/2 of
"A." Then using the same midline, mark the distance 1/2 of "A" above and below the midline. These two
marks establish the position of the base and waist lines (figure 1-57).
You also can use vertical guidelines with horizontal guidelines. When used, space vertical guidelines
randomly along and parallel to the horizontal guidelines. Vertical guidelines provide a reference point to
the vertical
plane that you can use to ensure your lettering remains vertical.
For inclined lettering, you can use inclined guidelines, known as "direction lines," with the horizontal
guideline.
Use the angle best suited for the lettering project. Normally, direction lines slant no more than 68

UPPERCASE AND LOWERCASE

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case

In orthography and typography, letter case (or just case) is the distinction between the letters that are in
larger upper case (also capital letters,capitals, caps, majuscule, or large letters) and smaller lower
Upper case

E F

H I J K L

S T

Lower case

case (also minuscule or small letters) in the written representation of certain languages. Here is a
comparison of the upper and lower case versions of each letter included in the English alphabet (the exact
representation will vary according to the font used):

Typographically, the basic difference between the majuscules and minuscules is not that the majuscules
are big and minuscules small, but that the majuscules generally have the same height, while the height of
the minuscules varies, as some of them have parts higher or lower than the average
(ascenders and descenders: "bdfghjklpqty").
The upper-case forms are regarded as the basic or citation forms of the letters. In orthography, the upper
case is primarily reserved for special purposes, and typically used for the first letter of a sentence or of
a proper noun, which makes the lower case the more common variant. Languages have capitalization
rules to determine whether one should use an upper- or lower-case letter in a given context, but there can
also be stylistic variation.

BASIC LETTERING STYLES

Source: http://www.ehow.com/list_6904207_lettering-styles-drafting.html

Lettering, when used in drafting, is a difficult art to master. For this reason, computer word-processing
programs, which ensure neat and uniform letters, are more widely used today than hand-lettering. Even
so, many cartoonists, architects, engineers and others prefer to use traditional hand-lettering in their
crafts.

Basic Block
The basic block style is the most common style for architecture and scenic drafting, and the first style that
should be attempted before trying fancier variations. To letter in the basic block style, make sure that all
letters are capital, the same size and square. An exception to this rule are the letters M and W, which are a
little wider. To keep the lettering horizontal and the same height, the draftsman should draw guidelines
before writing letters. These guidelines can be drawn with a ruler or a special lettering guide.

Oval
The oval lettering style is a variation of basic block, in which curved letters such as C, D, and O are drawn
in a slightly slanted manner, up and to the right. The other rules of basic block lettering apply to this style.

Slanted Horizontals
In slanted horizontals lettering, another variation of basic block, the horizontal lines in letters such as F and
E, excepting Z, are slightly slanted upwards. The slanted horizontal style is often combined with the oval
style.

Classification of Letter Style

Source: http://draftingbyalaine.blogspot.com/

Gothic Letters
Simplest and easiest to print among letter style because of its elementary stroke.
All letters are composed of uniform width.

Roman Letters
Letter having thin and thick elements and accented by serifs and fillets.
Considered as the most formal form of letter styles.

Text Letters
Also known as the Old English letters. Considered as most classical letter style because of its artistic forms.
The appropriate type of letter for diplomas and certificates.

Italic Letters
It simply refers to all slanting letters regardless of style and forms.

Proportional Lettering
Source: http://armycommunications.tpub.com/ss0530a/ss0530a0067.htm

When lettering is proportional, all letters are the same height and width. When lettering a graphic project,
the lettering must have the same proportion when used in phrases, sentences, or presentations. If the
lettering on a project is not proportional, it distracts from the eye appeal of the project and often
distracts the reader of the intended message.

Figure 1-58 shows disproportionate lettering and uniform, proportional lettering. After reviewing the
lettering in the figure, you can see none of the disproportionate letters are the same; and they distract
from the clarity of the lettering. The uniform, proportional letters are the same size, easy to read, and eye
appealing.

HISTORY OF LETTERS
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic
languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout
the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. [1] Its first origins can be traced back to
a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers in
Egypt. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related toEgyptian
hieroglyphs.[2][3]
Mainly through Phoenician and Aramaic, two closely related members of the Semitic family of
scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE, the Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of
multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa and South Asia.
Some modern authors distinguish between consonantal scripts of the Semitic type, called "abjads",
and "true alphabets" in the narrow sense,[4][5] the distinguishing criterion being that true alphabets
consistently assign letters to both consonants and vowels on an equal basis, while in an abjad each symbol
usually stands for a consonant. In this sense, the first true alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was
adapted from the Phoenician. Latin, the most widely used alphabet today,[6] in turn derives from Greek (by
way of Cumaeand the Etruscans).

Predecessors
Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian
cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts:
as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the hieroglyph;
more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives (which
provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds).[7] Since vowels were mostly unwritten,
the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been used as a consonantal alphabet (or
"abjad"). This was not done when writing the Egyptian language, but seems to have been significant
influence on the creation of the first alphabet (used to write a Semitic language). All subsequent alphabets
around the world have either descended from this first Semitic alphabet, or have been inspired by one of
its descendants (i.e. "stimulus diffusion"), with the possible exception of the Meroitic alphabet, a 3rdcentury BCE adaptation of hieroglyphs in Nubia to the south of Egypt though even here many scholars
suspect the influence of the first alphabet.

Consonantal alphabets

Semitic alphabet

The Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt has yet to be fully deciphered. However, it may be alphabetic and
probably records the Canaanite language. The oldest examples are found asgraffiti in the Wadi el Hol and
date to perhaps 1850 BCE. The table below shows hypothetical prototypes of the Phoenician alphabet in
Egyptian hieroglyphs. Several correspondences have been proposed with Proto-Sinaitic letters.
This Semitic script adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to write consonantal values based on the first sound of
the Semitic name for the object depicted by the hieroglyph (the "acrophonic principle") So, for example,
the hieroglyph per ("house" in Egyptian) was used to write the sound [b] in Semitic, because was the first
sound in the Semitic word for "house", bayt. The script was used only sporadically, and retained its
pictographic nature, for half a millennium, until adopted for governmental use in Canaan . The first
Canaanite states to make extensive use of the alphabet were the Phoenician city-states and so later stages
of the Canaanite script are called Phoenician. The Phoenician cities were maritime states at the center of a
vast trade network and soon the Phoenician alphabet spread throughout the Mediterranean. Two variants
of the Phoenician alphabet had major impacts on the history of writing: the Aramaic alphabet and
the Greek alphabet.

Descendants of the Aramaic abjad

bet, which evolved from the Phoenician in the 7th century BCE as the official script of the Persian Empire,
appears to be the ancestor of nearly all the modern alphabets of Asia:

The modern Hebrew alphabet started out as a local variant of Imperial Aramaic. (The original
Hebrew alphabet has been retained by theSamaritans.)

The Arabic alphabet descended from Aramaic via the Nabataean alphabet of what is now
southern Jordan.

The Syriac alphabet used after the 3rd century CE evolved, through Pahlavi and Sogdian, into the
alphabets of northern Asia, such asOrkhon (probably), Uyghur, Mongolian, and Manchu.

The Georgian alphabet is of uncertain provenance, but appears to be part of the Persian-Aramaic
(or perhaps the Greek) family.

True alphabets

Greek Alphabet

By at least the 8th century BCE the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and adapted it to their
own language, creating in the process the first "true" alphabet, in which vowels were accorded equal
status with consonants. According to Greek legends transmitted byHerodotus, the alphabet was brought
from Phoenicia to Greece by Cadmos. The letters of the Greek alphabet are the same as those of the
Phoenician alphabet, and both alphabets are arranged in the same order. However, whereas separate
letters for vowels would have actually hindered the legibility of Egyptian, Phoenician, or Hebrew, their
absence was problematic for Greek, where vowels played a much more important role. The Greeks used
for vowels some of the Phoenician letters representing consonants which weren't used in Greek speech. All
of the names of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet started with consonants, and these consonants were
what the letters represented, something called theacrophonic principle.

However, several Phoenician consonants were absent in Greek, and thus several letter names came to
be pronounced with initial vowels. Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of
the letter, in Greek these letters now stood for vowels.[citation needed] For example, the Greeks had no glottal
stop or h, so the Phoenician letters alepand he became Greek alpha and e (later renamed e psilon), and
stood for the vowels /a/ and/e/ rather than the consonants // and /h/. As this fortunate development only
provided for five or six (depending on dialect) of the twelve Greek vowels, the Greeks eventually
created digraphs and other modifications, such as ei, ou, and o (which became omega), or in some cases
simply ignored the deficiency, as in long a, i, u.
Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as Western Greek or Chalcidian, was
used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in Asia
Minor (also called Asian Greece i.e. present-day aegean Turkey). The Athenians (c. 400 BCE) adopted that
latter variation and eventually the rest of the Greek-speaking world followed. After first writing right to left,
the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right, unlike the Phoenicians who wrote from right to left.
Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can
be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon to left-to-right writing.

Descendance

Greek is in turn the source for all the modern scripts of Europe. The alphabet of the early western
Greek dialects, where the letter etaremained an h, gave rise to the Old Italic and from these Old Roman
alphabet derived. In the eastern Greek dialects, which did not have an /h/, eta stood for a vowel, and
remains a vowel in modern Greek and all other alphabets derived from the eastern
variants: Glagolitic,Cyrillic, Armenian, Gothic (which used both Greek and Roman letters), and
perhaps Georgian.
Although this description presents the evolution of scripts in a linear fashion, this is a simplification. For
example, theManchu alphabet, descended from the abjads of West Asia, was also influenced by
Korean hangul, which was either independent (the traditional view) or derived from the abugidas of South
Asia. Georgian apparently derives from the Aramaic family, but was strongly influenced in its conception
by Greek. A modified version of the Greek alphabet, using an additional half dozen demotic hieroglyphs,
was used to write Coptic Egyptian. Then there is Cree syllabics(an abugida), which is a fusion
of Devanagari and Pitman shorthand developed by the missionary James Evans.

Latin alphabet

A tribe known as the Latins, who became known as the Romans, also lived in the Italian peninsula
like the Western Greeks. From the Etruscans, a tribe living in the first millennium BCE in central Italy, and
the Western Greeks, the Latins adopted writing in about the seventh century. In adopted writing from these
two groups, the Latins dropped four characters from the Western Greek alphabet. They also adapted

the Etruscan letter F, pronounced 'w,' giving it the 'f' sound, and the Etruscan S, which had three zigzag
lines, was curved to make the modern S. To represent the Gsound in Greek and the K sound in Etruscan,
the Gamma was used. These changes produced the modern alphabet without the letters G, J, U, W, Y,
and Z, as well as some other differences.
C, K, and Q in the Roman alphabet could all be used to write both the /k/ and // sounds; the
Romans soon modified the letter C to make G, inserted it in seventh place, where Z had been, to maintain
the gematria (the numerical sequence of the alphabet). Over the few centuries after Alexander the
Great conquered the Eastern Mediterranean and other areas in the third century BCE, the Romans began
to borrow Greek words, so they had to adapt their alphabet again in order to write these words. From the
Eastern Greek alphabet, they borrowed Y and Z, which were added to the end of the alphabet because the
only time they were used was to write Greek words.
The Anglo-Saxons began using Roman letters to write Old English as they converted to Christianity,
followingAugustine of Canterbury's mission to Britain in the sixth century. Because the Runic wen, which
was first used to represent the sound 'w' and looked like a p that is narrow and triangular, was easy to
confuse with an actual p, the 'w' sound began to be written using a double u. Because the u at the time
looked like a v, the double u looked like two v's,W was placed in the alphabet by V. U developed when
people began to use the rounded U when they meant the vowel u and the pointed V when the meant the
consonant V. J began as a variation of I, in which a long tail was added to the final I when there were
several in a row. People began to use the J for the consonant and the I for the vowel by the fifteenth
century, and it was fully accepted in the mid-seventeenth century.

Graphically Independent Alphabets

One modern national alphabet that has not been graphically traced back to the Canaanite alphabet
is the Maldivian script, which is unique in that, although it is clearly modeled after Arabic and perhaps
other existing alphabets, it derives its letter forms from numerals. Another is the Korean Hangul, which was
created independently in 1443. TheOsmanya alphabet was devised for Somali in the 1920s by Osman
Yusuf Kenadid, and the forms of its consonants appear to be complete innovations.
Among alphabets that are not used as national scripts today, a few are clearly independent in their
letter forms. The Zhuyin phonetic alphabet derives from Chinese characters. The Santali alphabet of
eastern India appears to be based on traditional symbols such as "danger" and "meeting place", as well as
pictographs invented by its creator. (The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they
represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or
vowel of the name that the letter represents: le "swelling" represents e, while en "thresh grain"
represents n.)
In early medieval Ireland, Ogham consisted of tally marks, and the monumental inscriptions of
the Old Persian Empire were written in an essentially alphabetic cuneiform script whose letter forms seem
to have been created for the occasion.

Alphabets in other media

Changes to a new writing medium sometimes caused a break in graphical form, or make the
relationship difficult to trace. It is not immediately obvious that the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet derives
from a prototypical Semitic abjad, for example, although this appears to be the case. And while manual
alphabets are a direct continuation of the local written alphabet (both the British two-handed and
the French/American one-handed alphabets retain the forms of the Latin alphabet, as the Indian manual
alphabet does Devanagari, and the Korean does Hangul), Braille, semaphore, maritime signal flags, and
the Morse codes are essentially arbitrary geometric forms. The shapes of the English Braille and
semaphore letters, for example, are derived from the alphabetic order of the Latin alphabet, but not from
the graphic forms of the letters themselves. Modern shorthand also appears to be graphically unrelated. If
it derives from the Latin alphabet, the connection has been lost to history.