It is well known that thermodynamic diagrams in textbooks are seldom accurately drawn. The most common example is the Carnot cycle of an ideal gas. As drawn on a pressure-volume (P-V) diagram, the isotherms of the cycle should lie on rectangular hyperbolae. However they cannot then be clearly distinguished from the adiabatics, and in practice the cycle is drawn with the isotherms flattened. The distinction between adiabatics and isothermals is then clearly seen by the student but the distortion involved in this presentation is usually ignored.This may not matter for the simple Carnot cycle. It certainly does matter for the pressure-temperature (P-T) and P-Vphase diagrams which show the melting, boiling and crystal structure transitions of a substance. These transitions differ so greatly in magnitude that some distortion is essential if all the relevant details are to be presented, but the result is that students hardly ever see an accurately drawn diagram. Indeed, they seldom see a complete diagram for a real substance at all, to scale or not. Consequently they find it difficult to develop any 'feel' for the magnitudes of the various quantities.They also fail to realize that the various crystal structures of a substance are distinct solid phases which take their place alongside the liquid and gaseous phases in the P-V and P-T diagrams.Some diagrams, such as entropy+nthalpy (Mollier) charts are already available to scale. However, these usually omit the solid phases and are, in any case, less suitable for teaching purposes than diagrams of the directly observable parameters P, Vand T.