Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>> Inductors are drawn as coils, not as solid filled rectangle.  Pay
>> attention to details.
>
> Says who (besides you, of course)? :)
>
> Note that I have nothing against the coil version, but the other
> version is pretty common, too.

Not where I've looked.  Sometimes inductors are drawn with a bunch of top
half of circles stuck together.  I think that's good enough, but I like to
take a little extra care and show the loops.  Put it this way, which is mor=
e
likely to be confused, a loopy inductor or a filled box?  I would find it
hard to believe that the loopy version would be ambiguous to anyone around
the world who has at least a cursory knowledge of schematics, whereas I
wouldn't say the same for the filled box.  Where's the upside?

The point of many electrical symbols is that they are intended to be quick
visual reminders of what the part does.  In that context resistors as
zigzags, capacitors are two parallel lines, and inductors as loops make a
lot of sense.  The symbols for vacuum tubes, diodes, and even transistors
were clearly designed with this concept in mind too.  It gets more
complicated for intgrated circuits, so you usually give up and draw a box
and label the lines.

Unfortunately we see more and more shortcuts.  I don't know if it's
laziness, sloppiness, or what.  The old way makes sense.  This is the first
I've seen a inductor look not loopy though.  Let's not get sloppy with thos=
e
too.  It's bad enough that it's become acceptable in some places to draw
resistors as rectangular boxes.  I don't know where that came from, but I
don't understand why someone had to go invent a new and less descriptive
symbol when there was a nice one already standard.  All "old" schematics
I've ever seen show resistors as zigzags, so I think the box came later.

> I think any EE should be familiar with
> it, something like being familiar with "km" even though it's not
> frequently used everywhere.

I don't know what "km" is either.  Do you mean "Km" perhaps?


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