I can speak for two US manufacturing companies, and say without any reservation whatsoever that 99% of the people I work with, even the ones that produce drawings, don't know how much of the drawing standard works. I even had a senior engineer try and tell me that basic dimensions aren't required for true position tolerances! Even though our prints go through three people (drafter, design engineer, manufacturing engineer) who are supposed to check them for problems before they reach us, we find issues constantly. The more I learn about the standard, the more I believe that the number of prints I've seen that comply to it completely could be counted on my fingers and toes without taking off my shoes. As for visual quality, it varies widely. Sometimes we can barely read prints, particulary if they're for an ECO, and sometimes they're high resolution and extremely easy to read. I believe several posters hit things on the head: People don't know the standard, don't want to know the standard, and the companies don't care - or at least, not until they get some bad parts because the drawings were garbage, at which point nothing happens except they mark up the print on the floor and remake or rework the bad parts. CAD has helped for high-complexity parts, I think, but where I work there are several CAD packages being used in parallel, many older engineers who don't want to learn 3D drafting (let alone GD&T and the drawing standard), and lots of young engineers fresh out of Virginia Tech who learned CAD modelling upside-down and backwards at school but nothing about actually producing drawings (Yes, I've asked them and they stated unashamedly that they learned nothing about dimensioning and tolerancing).
JHG
