The Clearview Subject

[vdeane]

but it will certainly be a problem not just for Texas but also for Arizona, Michigan, Oklahoma, Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

And Vermont.  FHWA series guide signs are quite rare in that state now.  It will be a shame to see it go there.  VTrans is one agency that made clearview look beautiful.

Pity it took NYSTA several years to start making decent clearview signs.  Most of the ones erected look terrible.  There are two that look decent.  And no two clearview signs seem to be designed to exactly the same standards.  I suspect that NYSTA was experimenting with each and every sign, though it's hard to tell since they don't do route/county-wide sign rehabs like NYSDOT does.

IMO this is the best looking clearview sign NYSTA ever made: http://goo.gl/maps/eIzn3

[Scott5114]

It cannot go back to all-uppercase because, as of the 2009 edition, that no longer complies with the MUTCD.  This problem will not apply to states that took out Clearview authorizations but didn't convert to Clearview on their state highway systems (Kansas and Utah fall into this category), but it will certainly be a problem not just for Texas but also for Arizona, Michigan, Oklahoma, Virginia, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.

You can strike Oklahoma from this list. ODOT has posted its newest conventional-road signs in mixed-case Clearview, but most of them are still all-caps D, and are not all that old, dating from the mid 2000s, when ODOT went through and replaced older all-caps C signs. However, I have seen some mixed-case FHWA Series conventional road signs in western Oklahoma (namely on SH-152 west of Sayre), so they do have the technical ability to do this ready to go.

KRXO radio out of Grays Harbor County, Washington

This caught my eye since KRXO is the local classic rock station here in OKC! Of course, reading further, I realized that was just a typo.

[Bobby5280]

To my knowledge, it is not. Presumably such a description would have been added to the SHS book if Clearview were endorsed as the recommended font in the MUTCD. It is, of course, possible to derive such things manually, as Michael Adams did, but that would naturally require much more effort.

Years ago I downloaded a PDF from TX DOT called "CTSEng.pdf" which was a Clearview based supplement for the Texas own flavor of the 2006 MUTCD. It had 20 pages worth of spacing tables and a lot more pages showing closer views of the letter forms. It's an encrypted & password protected PDF; you would have the break the password block to be able to gain access to the letter forms. And only then you would have to do something like place/link the PDF file in Adobe Illustrator and "flatten transparancy" to convert the embedded fonts to outlines. Otherwise all the type would revert into Myriad Pro.

"It gave the states a template for road design and sign design that will be universal throughout the 50 states and is also idiot proof." And yet here we are talking about how idiots failed to follow it. The federal government exists to arbitrate differences between the states, not impose standards on all of them. And despite setting these standards, this very forum is loaded with examples of gross violations of those standards.

Here's the fundamental problem: you can't have non-designers doing sign design work and expect proper attention to details, proper layout fundamentals and proper quality control over the sign fabrication process. Having a manual like the MUTCD is fine. But you still need people with visual oriented problem solving skills to put it into action.

Some bureaucrat can add another 200 pages of rules to the MUTCD, change things, go backward on other rules, and it won't solve any problems. If anything, the problem with botched sign designs will only get worse. Add in the extra ingredient of limited funds, the need to pinch pennies. That creates even more rule-breaking signs.

[J N Winkler]

Years ago I downloaded a PDF from TX DOT called "CTSEng.pdf" which was a Clearview based supplement for the Texas own flavor of the 2006 MUTCD. It had 20 pages worth of spacing tables and a lot more pages showing closer views of the letter forms. It's an encrypted & password protected PDF; you would have the break the password block to be able to gain access to the letter forms. And only then you would have to do something like place/link the PDF file in Adobe Illustrator and "flatten transparancy" to convert the embedded fonts to outlines. Otherwise all the type would revert into Myriad Pro.

Are you sure that file was specific to Texas and not the FHWA Clearview supplement?  The filenames are the same.  The FHWA Clearview supplement presents the Clearview letters as rasters, probably to prevent glyph copying.

To my knowledge, it is not. Presumably such a description would have been added to the SHS book if Clearview were endorsed as the recommended font in the MUTCD. It is, of course, possible to derive such things manually, as Michael Adams did, but that would naturally require much more effort.

I concur re. the non-availability of dimensioned drawings for Clearview letters--I have never seen any and, frankly, doubt any have been produced.

My understanding is that Michael Adams produced the Roadgeek fonts (both FHWA Series and Clearview) by raster-dumping at the best resolution available, autotracing, and doing a cleanup job to remove most of the excess nodes, in order to avoid relying on the argument that glyphs are not copyright in the US.  For the FHWA Series he was able to dump at extremely high resolution since the actual URW fonts are embedded in the Standard Alphabets PDF that was then (and still is) available for download.  For Clearview he had to use the Clearview supplement with its limited-resolution rasters.  This is why Roadgeek Clearview is much more "hairy" at high magnification than the Roadgeek FHWA series, which in turn are somewhat more "hairy" than the professionally produced URW fonts, for which I think the glyphs were actually confected from dimensioned drawings whenever those were available.  (They are definitely available for uppercase Series A through F from the 1945 edition of Standard Alphabets, but I have never seen them for the lowercase letters.)

[Quillz]

I still have the "official" ClearviewHwy fonts that I bought directly from the vendor if anyone wants them.

[Zeffy]

I still have the "official" ClearviewHwy fonts that I bought directly from the vendor if anyone wants them.

I have that font package you uploaded when I first joined. Thanks for that by the way! I noticed the link is long dead now though.

Here's the fundamental problem: you can't have non-designers doing sign design work and expect proper attention to details, proper layout fundamentals and proper quality control over the sign fabrication process. Having a manual like the MUTCD is fine. But you still need people with visual oriented problem solving skills to put it into action.

Yeah you can - they use GuidSIGN and SignCAD anyway, which makes it incredibly easy to design the signs. I think I read that SignCAD has a problem with Clearview and usually barfs out Arial instead.

[sammi]

I still have the "official" ClearviewHwy fonts that I bought directly from the vendor if anyone wants them.

I have that font package you uploaded when I first joined. Thanks for that by the way! I noticed the link is long dead now though.

I've since rehosted said package here: http://g3sf.x10.mx/sammdot/fonts/Quillz-RoadFonts.zip

[Quillz]

Is GuideSIGN and SignCAD the best way to design highway shields? I've tried recreating Interstate shields in Illustrator, and a lot of the specs featured in the SHS simply make no sense from my perspective. I've often wanted to make some signs that featured Clearview, but it's hard to do so, at least for me.

[Quillz]

I still have the "official" ClearviewHwy fonts that I bought directly from the vendor if anyone wants them.

I have that font package you uploaded when I first joined. Thanks for that by the way! I noticed the link is long dead now though.

I've since rehosted said package here: http://g3sf.x10.mx/sammdot/fonts/Quillz-RoadFonts.zip

Neat, thanks for rehosting. I don't run my web server anymore so the old URL is naturally dead. I have a similar ZIP archive with ClearviewHwy + Saa + PIXsymbols2002, the latter being the best implementation of the FHWA Series fonts I've come across. (Although Saa has the advantage of including Series A, it seems to be based on pre-2000s guidelines).

[sammi]

I've tried recreating Interstate shields in Illustrator, and a lot of the specs featured in the SHS simply make no sense from my perspective. I've often wanted to make some signs that featured Clearview, but it's hard to do so, at least for me.

I've been able to recreate Interstate, US and California shields (the only ones available with RSM so far) from specifications in the SHSM and the California Coded Sign Specs with no problems so far. I think for some of them don't quite line up, if that's what you mean (I had that problem with the 2dCA shield).

How is it hard for you to make Clearview signs?

[Quillz]

I've tried recreating Interstate shields in Illustrator, and a lot of the specs featured in the SHS simply make no sense from my perspective. I've often wanted to make some signs that featured Clearview, but it's hard to do so, at least for me.

I've been able to recreate Interstate, US and California shields (the only ones available with RSM so far) from specifications in the SHSM and the California Coded Sign Specs with no problems so far. I think for some of them don't quite line up, if that's what you mean (I had that problem with the 2dCA shield).

How is it hard for you to make Clearview signs?

I'm referring specifically to some of the posted specs in the SHS. Most of them are easy enough to understand, size of legend, its placement in relation to the top or bottom, but then they simply point to various curves without any actual explanation of the exact angle, etc. Making them hard to recreate in Illustrator and other vector programs. Which is why I'm wondering if things like GuideSIGN are the best for making actual shields.

Though this is getting off-topic.

[Alps]

Is GuideSIGN and SignCAD the best way to design highway shields? I've tried recreating Interstate shields in Illustrator, and a lot of the specs featured in the SHS simply make no sense from my perspective. I've often wanted to make some signs that featured Clearview, but it's hard to do so, at least for me.

Man, the best way I've found: The dimensions are there in the MUTCD. Make your own shields to those dimensions. Get GuidSIGN to spit out the number in the height you want, then manually position it on the sign per MUTCD/Standard Highway Signs.

[J N Winkler]

Is GuidSIGN and SignCAD the best way to design highway shields? I've tried recreating Interstate shields in Illustrator, and a lot of the specs featured in the SHS simply make no sense from my perspective. I've often wanted to make some signs that featured Clearview, but it's hard to do so, at least for me.

I wouldn't use either application for designing shields--their primary purpose is to confect sign panel layouts, and the vendors of both rely on state DOTs sending them dimensioned drawings of their shields that they can then incorporate into the software.

Shields for which dimensioned drawings are available that set out the design parameters using lines and circular arcs are usually pretty easy to draw.  The dimensions that aren't given explicitly often fall out through symmetry or can be solved trigonometrically.  You just have to master the "create object with precision" options that are available in your preferred vector drawing package.  I have had reasonably good luck drawing guide-sign markers for Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota state highways in CorelDRAW directly from the specs.  The only shields that have caused me problems so far are the Nevada state highway marker and the Minnesota county pentagon, and that is because both specify certain angles in a way that involves calculating points of tangency, which is very difficult to do analytically in these particular cases.

[vtk]

The only shields that have caused me problems so far are the Nevada state highway marker and the Minnesota county pentagon, and that is because both specify certain angles in a way that involves calculating points of tangency, which is very difficult to do analytically in these particular cases.

I'm a competent user of CAD. If you send me the specs, maybe I can draft the markers, and send you drawings with more explicit dimensions, or as SVG.

[J N Winkler]

I'm a competent user of CAD. If you send me the specs, maybe I can draft the markers, and send you drawings with more explicit dimensions, or as SVG.

I think SVG would probably be best for sharing.

The Nevada DOT guide-sign marker is available here (PDF page 2):

http://nevadadot.com/uploadedFiles/NDOT/About_NDOT/NDOT_Divisions/Planning/Safety_Engineering/2006_TSS_Guide.pdf

The MnDOT county pentagon drawing is available here (PDF page 16):

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/trafficeng/publ/signsmanual/standardsigns-2013-mseries.pdf

If limited time forces a choice between the two, I'd go for the Nevada marker since (1) there are no convenient substitutes (the independent-mount marker cannot be repurposed as a guide-sign marker for sign drawings since it is too different in design), and (2) I actually suspect MnDOT's county pentagon is the same as the generic design, for which there may be other drawings floating around that are easier to work with.

[vtk]

I'm a competent user of CAD. If you send me the specs, maybe I can draft the markers, and send you drawings with more explicit dimensions, or as SVG.

I think SVG would probably be best for sharing.

The Nevada DOT guide-sign marker is available here (PDF page 2):

http://nevadadot.com/uploadedFiles/NDOT/About_NDOT/NDOT_Divisions/Planning/Safety_Engineering/2006_TSS_Guide.pdf

The MnDOT county pentagon drawing is available here (PDF page 16):

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/trafficeng/publ/signsmanual/standardsigns-2013-mseries.pdf

Nevada marker is now available in the Vid's SVG Foundry thread.  I may yet do the pentagon, announcing completion thereof in that thread as well.  MnDOT guide sign pentagons are now there too.

[talllguy]

Interesting long form article from 2007 on Clearview: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12fonts-t.html?pagewanted=all

"A greek version is planned." Is that still the case?

[Bobby5280]

I think if Terminal Design was going to update Clearview Highway with Greek language support it would have happened by now.

One thing I find odd is how Clearview ADA has a complete native small capitals character set included with the standard upper & lower case characters. But Clearview Highway and Clearview Text do not.

Are you sure that file was specific to Texas and not the FHWA Clearview supplement?  The filenames are the same.  The FHWA Clearview supplement presents the Clearview letters as rasters, probably to prevent glyph copying.

I have the Clearview supplement PDF with raster-based glyphs, but I'm pretty certain there was another version of it with the fonts embedded. I specifically remember being able to select the text with the text tool. Even with embedded vectors the font outlines would be a problem without a properly established baseline also included. These letters, as well as the Series 2000 fonts version, just had the letters scattered across a grid without the grid lining up to anything logical such as the baseline.

Michael Adams did a good job with his Road Geek fonts. I don't know if he had access to Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator would have done away with any need of rasterizing any font outlines. If a PDF has embedded fonts not installed on the computer viewing them the PDF can be "placed" into an Illustrator file (with the "link" box checked). The fonts will remain intact. The "flatten transparency" dialog box can be used to convert those font letter forms into vector outlines. Using that method Adams could have extracted perfect copies of the font outlines. However, he would have still had to go through the work of getting them placed properly according to baselines, cap height lines, etc.

Yeah you can - they use GuidSIGN and SignCAD anyway, which makes it incredibly easy to design the signs. I think I read that SignCAD has a problem with Clearview and usually barfs out Arial instead.

The software isn't the issue. Regardless of how difficult or easy a company makes graphic design software to use the person doing the design work must still have an eye for knowing when a layout looks right or wrong as well as catching mistakes like spelling errors. A visually oriented person is always going to be a lot better at that.

Regarding Arial, I have a strong dislike of that typeface but an even larger hatred for how I see it misused on countless commercial business signs. The only thing positive I can say for Arial is it has a very extensive character set in the latest versions of Windows (broad foreign language support, native small caps, superior/inferior numerators, complete fraction sets, etc.). It's just still a pretty ugly typeface.

I have had reasonably good luck drawing guide-sign markers for Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota state highways in CorelDRAW directly from the specs.  The only shields that have caused me problems so far are the Nevada state highway marker and the Minnesota county pentagon, and that is because both specify certain angles in a way that involves calculating points of tangency, which is very difficult to do analytically in these particular cases.

Not that highway sign spec books necessarily do this, but I've come across a lot of technical drawings over the years where people round up to the nearest 1/8th or 1/16th of an inch when showing numbers on a dimensions call-out.

CorelDRAW has given me the best results on drawing things like guide markers. However, I design them (and my other signs) at full size. The CorelDRAW art board can comfortably fit designs up to 1000" X 1000" before zoom limits start becoming a problem. I can always fire up Flexi if I need a larger work space. I can zoom into artwork far more tightly using CorelDRAW than I can Adobe Illustrator (264439% in CorelDRAW versus 6400% in Illustrator). Adobe Illustrator can specify object dimensions out to four decimal points versus three in CorelDRAW, but Illustrator has a maximum art board size of 227" X 227" which forces one to design a lot of things in scale rather than full size.

I do like Adobe Illustrator for its superior ability on opening & editing PDF files. Illustrator does a much better job of opening & creating SVG files. Illustrator is also far more integrated with Photoshop and After Effects. Both Corel and Illustrator are vital for my tool set.

[J N Winkler]

Michael Adams did a good job with his Road Geek fonts. I don't know if he had access to Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator would have done away with any need of rasterizing any font outlines. If a PDF has embedded fonts not installed on the computer viewing them the PDF can be "placed" into an Illustrator file (with the "link" box checked). The fonts will remain intact. The "flatten transparency" dialog box can be used to convert those font letter forms into vector outlines. Using that method Adams could have extracted perfect copies of the font outlines. However, he would have still had to go through the work of getting them placed properly according to baselines, cap height lines, etc.

I recall that he used a specialist font editor from Macromedia.  I am sure he was aware that he could have extracted the glyphs much as you describe, but made a conscious decision not to do so in order to head off copyright issues.  And, in any case, establishing the correct baseline, tile widths, and position of glyph within each tile would have been about 97% of the work.

[sammi]

Michael Adams did a good job with his Road Geek fonts. I don't know if he had access to Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator would have done away with any need of rasterizing any font outlines. If a PDF has embedded fonts not installed on the computer viewing them the PDF can be "placed" into an Illustrator file (with the "link" box checked). The fonts will remain intact.

I did a similar thing with the Roadgeek 2014 fonts, which I intend to be a replacement of the 2005 ones, but with no proprietary software, except for the font editor (FontForge, the only free font editor I know of, crashed quite frequently). My toolchain was: MuPDF to extract the fonts in CFF format, a CFF-TTF converter the name of which I forget, Inkscape to generate the rasters and trace them again, then FontCreator to actually put the font together.

I do like Adobe Illustrator for its superior ability on opening & editing PDF files. Illustrator does a much better job of opening & creating SVG files.

Better than? CorelDRAW, perhaps; Inkscape, not at all. Inkscape is the SVG editor (and it's open source!). It complies to the SVG 1.1 specification. Illustrator, on the other hand, exports SVG with some sort of Adobe metadata, which renders it invalid when opened in Inkscape (this came up elsewhere on the forum). The browser should render it with few to no problems though.

I am sure he was aware that he could have extracted the glyphs much as you describe, but made a conscious decision not to do so in order to head off copyright issues.

Right. You can't extract the glyphs directly (which is what Bobby5280 is suggesting), but you can rasterize then vectorize it again.

[vtk]

Inkscape is the SVG editor (and it's open source!). It complies to the SVG 1.1 specification.

Inkscape isn't perfect in that regard either.  It writes properties like font-family: Roadgeek 2005 Series D; which, without quotes, is inconsistent with SVG spec and Firefox doesn't render it right. 

[Bobby5280]

Better than? CorelDRAW, perhaps; Inkscape, not at all. Inkscape is the SVG editor (and it's open source!). It complies to the SVG 1.1 specification. Illustrator, on the other hand, exports SVG with some sort of Adobe metadata, which renders it invalid when opened in Inkscape (this came up elsewhere on the forum). The browser should render it with few to no problems though.

SVG is built upon Postscript, an Adobe technology. I've been using CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator both for over 20 years and have used Inkscape quite a bit. Maybe some of what I've been running into with Inkscape has to do with Adobe created SVG files. Nonetheless, Inkscape ought to be smart enough to look past any Adobe generated comments in the metadata. The Inkscape application itself pales greatly in comparison to CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator. But it's better than nothing.

Inkscape is what I recommend to so many amateur graphic designers looking to design a company logo or other similar items without having to spend a bunch of money on professional level graphics software. It pisses me off to no end how so many so-called graphic designers use Adobe Photoshop or other pixel-based image editors to create a company's logo. Their client is royally screwed when he has to make the stupid, clunky, pixel-based "logo" work in something like a lighted channel letter sign. Any logo's base version should be 100% vector and even vinyl plotter/routing table friendly. Vinyl cutters, routing tables and neon tube path making software don't understand pixels. They only deal with vector-based paths.

Right. You can't extract the glyphs directly (which is what Bobby5280 is suggesting), but you can rasterize then vectorize it again.

No. I didn't say anything about rasterizing the font glyphs. Using the Flatten Transparency dialog box in Adobe Illustrator you can convert the embedded fonts in any PDF to vector-based outlines. You place the PDF in linked form and then use the options in the flatten transparency command to convert the fonts into outlines. No rasterization is needed.

[sammi]

Right. You can't extract the glyphs directly (which is what Bobby5280 is suggesting), but you can rasterize then vectorize it again.

No. I didn't say anything about rasterizing the font glyphs. Using the Flatten Transparency dialog box in Adobe Illustrator you can convert the embedded fonts in any PDF to vector-based outlines. You place the PDF in linked form and then use the options in the flatten transparency command to convert the fonts into outlines. No rasterization is needed.

Exactly. You can't do that. What you can do is rasterize and retrace the glyphs.

[jakeroot]

Inkscape is what I recommend to so many amateur graphic designers looking to design a company logo or other similar items without having to spend a bunch of money on professional level graphics software. It pisses me off to no end how so many so-called graphic designers use Adobe Photoshop or other pixel-based image editors to create a company's logo. Their client is royally screwed when he has to make the stupid, clunky, pixel-based "logo" work in something like a lighted channel letter sign. Any logo's base version should be 100% vector and even vinyl plotter/routing table friendly. Vinyl cutters, routing tables and neon tube path making software don't understand pixels. They only deal with vector-based paths.

Reminds me of my years prior to high school where I first took a vector graphics class. My old process was opening up Photoshop and making a 6000x6000 image just in case I had to blow it up big-time. Of course, that whole concept is fatally flawed, so I'm glad that I now know better.

[vtk]

Right. You can't extract the glyphs directly (which is what Bobby5280 is suggesting), but you can rasterize then vectorize it again.

No. I didn't say anything about rasterizing the font glyphs. Using the Flatten Transparency dialog box in Adobe Illustrator you can convert the embedded fonts in any PDF to vector-based outlines. You place the PDF in linked form and then use the options in the flatten transparency command to convert the fonts into outlines. No rasterization is needed.

Exactly. You can't do that. What you can do is rasterize and retrace the glyphs.

Nipping this in the bud: one in fact can copy the glyph outlines without rasterizing and retracing them, but this may violate the original font foundry's copyright, so if they have good lawyers, then no you "can't"  do that.