re: individualizing CAD
I worked on some church renovations whose original designs were done in the 1920s and therabouts. Now there were some draftsmen!
I know what you mean, those old drawings are beautiful to read through. However, I'm not sure its a valid trade-off to have beautiful drawings compared to the volume one CAD drafter can produce nowdays. If I had to handletter my drawings, I wouldn't be employable. Yeah my scrawl is pretty bad, but on CAD it always comes out as architxt.ttf or more recently we've been converting to trebuchet.ttf. When I talk to the oldtimers, they say it took roughly 40 hours per sheet to draw once. Changes meant cut-n-paste as Robert described or starting over on the sheet. That's a lot of wasted productivity making beautiful drawings that only a handful of people will ever see. Yeah I'm of the new guard, I can appreciate the old, but would never trade it for the current.
Steve G.