See also drafter. For the board game piece, see Draughts

Draughts

Draughts is a group of abstract strategy board games between two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over the enemy's pieces. Draughts developed from alquerque...

.

A draughtsman or draftsman (the former more often in the UK, the latter more often in the US), is a person skilled in drawing, either:

• drawing
  Drawing
  Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
  
   for artistic purposes, or
• technical drawing
  Technical drawing
  Technical drawing, also known as drafting or draughting, is the act and discipline of composing plans that visually communicate how something functions or has to be constructed.Drafting is the language of industry....
  
   for practical purposes such as architecture
  Architecture
  Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
  
   or engineering
  Engineering
  Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
  
  . Many modern draughtsmen use computer aided drafting (CAD) software to produce drawings.

A draftsman, spelled the same way in both British

British English

British English, or English , is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere...

 and American English

American English

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....

, is also an individual who drafts (i.e. draws up) document

Document

The term document has multiple meanings in ordinary language and in scholarship. WordNet 3.1. lists four meanings :* document, written document, papers...

s, especially for official purposes.

A draftsperson is an artist skilled in technical drawing. The 'skill' is to draw complex instructions precisely and accurately. The 'art' is to arrange that information in an organised way which is also easily readable.

Drafting includes any task that utilizes graphics to convey instructions to another person. Commonly this is associated with the making of plans for structures or mechanical devices before they are built.

Disciplines of drafting include: Civil, Structural, Architectural, Plumbing, Cartography, Electrical, Thermodynamics (and HVAC), Mechanical, Hydraulics, Telecommunications, Materials, Aerodynamics, and Archaeology.

Alternate spellings include draughtsperson, draughtsman, draftsman, drafter or drafties.

CAD, or computer aided design, is the principal tool used by drafters to create drawings or plans. AutoCAD, MicroStation, Archicad, Vector Works, Allplan, Tekla Structures are some popular CAD software packages out of many.