Engineering Drawing Standards

This British Standard supersedes BS308-1:1993, BS308-2:1985 and BS308-3:1990, which are all withdrawn.  Drawing conventions which applied to BS 308-1'2'3 in general also apply to the European Standards referenced in BS 8888.

This standard is provided to unify all of the recently implemented ISO and EN ISO standards related to Technical Product Documentation (it references them).  Most designers and engineers should have no difficulty in working to the new standards. BS 8888 references standards covering all aspects of technical product documentation including:

An important difference between BS 308 and BS 8888 is in the marking of the decimal place.   In BS308 the decimal place is indicated with a decimal point.   In BS 8888 the decimal place is indicated with a comma with each group of three digits from the decimal provided with a space e.g. 14 234,012 8 .

For manual drawings this is not really a problem.   For Autocad drawings on a Windows based PC it is most convenient set the decimal point to display as a comma on the regional settings on the control panel (This option is available if you set the Country to German or France). .

British Standards are supplying a book which provides clear information on the application of BS 8888. The book is titled
BIP 2155:2009 The Essential Guide to Technical Product Specification: Engineering Drawing . {Neil Phelps and Colin Simmons]

BS 8888 Nominative Reference

In Appendix A of BS 8888 a list of Nominative reference standards is provided.     These standards contain the detailed requirements which must by met for claiming complience with BS 8888.     The pages linked below include the majority of these standards