I'm working on a book and am looking for advice about people's preferences in schematics. Or indeed if there is any standard that people actually stick to.
In particular, resistors - zig-zag line or box?
Is this just a european / US thing or a new / old thing.
Capacitors, pair of parallel rectangles filled for negative lead, or curved line and flat line.
The book is primarily for the US hobby electronics market, beginner level.
Cadsoft Eagle pcb and myself, use: resistors - zig-zag line.
That is the symbol I was taught to use in college.
Thanks, I suppose the other big style thing is jumps where lines cross and dont connect vs. dots where the do connect.
I guess what I want is maximum clarity that won't scare people.
One site indicated that the zig-zag symbol was the "old" symbol. All the sites I checked indicated zig-zag was the American symbol.
This link shows both pictures and may give food for though with the other types of resistors shown.
They still use zig-zag in the U.S. but to my eye now they look old fashion.
Although I still draw them when sketching on paper, they turn into boxes when the circuit is neat.
Same for pots.
I remember there were both aground from about 68 to 84 and the box took over.
I dislike caps with curved backs, that was before even my time 
Filled and open boxes for electrolitcs simple lines for everything else.
Transformers and inductors sometimes are boxes as well with a pair of parallel lines next to it, easier to draw than loops.
What ever you choose you will be wrong.
I remember learning zigzag lines in high-school in the US. Everything else looks strange to me. Capacitors I don't really care, but personally would go for parallel lines.
(I'm 26, live in europe, but went to high-school in the USA and worked in Canada for a while...)
Guess I'm old-school. Give me the zig-zags, boxes are too generic. Capacitors have one straight line and one curved, polarized capacitors have a + sign as well.
Zig-Zag lines on a schematic, boxes on the board layout.
This.
kf2qd:
Zig-Zag lines on a schematic, boxes on the board layout.
I like this too.
You know the old saying. The great thing about standards is that there are so many from which to choose!
kf2qd:
Zig-Zag lines on a schematic, boxes on the board layout.
Agree. Boxes work well for a lot of things on the board layout. Sometimes there is a tendency to get too fancy.
justjed:
You know the old saying. The great thing about standards is that there are so many from which to choose!
XD I like standards. Everyone should have one.
In school, I was taught to use zig-zag. Fast forward 15+ years and I still prefer my schematics with zig-zag. When I go and look at Application Notes or Datasheets from different component vendors, their schematics seem to still use zig-zags. However, being in the US I generally look at US-based companies.
TI: Charge controller for a solar MPPT
Typical Application, Page 2, zig-zags
I thought maybe Asia would be different.
Samsung: Motor controller application example:
Zig-zags
Before closing the door and saying engineers seem to always use zig-zags, I thought I should check someone from Europe...
STMicro, of course, uses boxes.
http://www.st.com/internet/com/TECHNICAL_RESOURCES/TECHNICAL_LITERATURE/APPLICATION_NOTE/CD00004352.pdf
Page 3.
And what about logic gates?
The old style where the shape meant the logic- or the new style which is a rectangle with say an "&" inside?
Personally I could never remember what shape meant what, but the symbols like "&" make it dead simple.
Atmel uses zig-zag in the ATmega328 datasheet.
Its beginning to sound like the US standard is zig-zags. Which I quite like. But I am with Mike on capacitors, I much prefer the European symbols for them. I also prefer line hops to dots on junctions.
Interestingly I used what I now know to be the very European symbols (rectangle resistors etc) for the Arduino Evil Genius book and I have not had any comments about the symbols used. Comments about mismatches between circuit and breadboard layout (blush) but no complaints about the format of the schematics. And its very much sold as a US book.
I'll have a 'look inside' of some popular beginner books on Amazon. See if I can find a justification for my prejudices.
Si.
I'm from Europe and I agree 8)
Jantje
Some applicable standards may include IEC 60617 (a.k.a. BS 3939) and ANSI Y32 (a.k.a. IEEE 315). Of course, like most standards, these are not available free, a fact which I have never quite been able to square in my mind. Maybe we need an open-source standards movement XD
If we can believe Wikipedia, the box is the international standard for resistors. I don't have a lot of difficulty adapting to the various resistor and capacitor symbols, I actually have more heartburn with the wire junctions. My personal practice (after MIL-TFD-41) was to always use dots to indicate a junction, whether I used hops or not (I seldom use hops these days). I also found some references (including the Wikipedia article above) which recommend using only 3-way junctions for clarity. Not sure how I feel about that either, tends to add clutter.
JimboZA:
Personally I could never remember what shape meant what, but the symbols like "&" make it dead simple.
They all meant the same thing: drafting supply houses selling lots of schematic templates. 
Depending on who is buying your book, but noobies may have enough other things they a learning that a rectangle or zigzag may be the least of their concerns. If your audience were more experienced readers you might have heard something (or maybe not).
I like to have a variety of symbols because it makes it easier to find the component I am looking for. If they are all boxes then I have to read them to figure out which box I am looking for (and I will probably forget what I was looking for in the first place...). Boxes make it easy to put them in quickly in CAD and to crowd them together on the schematic, but variety in the symbols does help readability.
When it comes to the dots or hops debate, I prefer the third option, the gap.
That is what I use in my circuits, like this one:-
http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Hardware/MIDI_Footsteps.html