topic Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously in Documentation

Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Tue, 30 May 2023 13:28:08 GMT

Ok, I am at a total loss on this one. I have 3 designers that say their dimension fonts and other text fonts apparently changed to Wingdings all on their own. They changed them to a standard Arial font, saved, closed, and opened again and the fonts were back to wingdings. If this was one person I would assume user stupidity, I mean user error. However, being that it is 3 separate people on 3 separate machine, on 3 different drawings something is definitely wrong.

Does anyone have any clue on how to start tracking down this kind of problem, and has anyone else experienced this type of issue before?

We are running AC 81 R2 on W2k.

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Jacek — Thu, 09 Sep 2004 23:10:22 GMT

Microsoft Poltergeist

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

ci-JoshOs — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:58:34 GMT

There was a problem with this in teamwork files when using the first release of 8.1 r2.
Is this the version you have?
If so, you need to get the R2C patch on your machines(contact your dealer or download it)

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 14:15:21 GMT

We are running 81 R2C. And have been running it for a little while now. This problem seem to just pop up in the past week. Any chance this is some form of virus, or are we just seeing Microsoft Gremlins at work.

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 17:36:30 GMT

AFAIR this is due to a feature (yeah right) in Archicad.

Fonts (for styles, for measurements, etc.) are referenced not (as mebbe they could and should be) by their NAME but instead, by their number. At a guess they are indexed alphabetically.

So if some designer on another computer loads (deliberately or accidentally (ie. during the course of loading another program)) new fonts this can create disparities between computers.

The work-a-round for now is to ensure that all office computers have the same set of fonts (yeah great).

The future will mean that Archicad will refer to fonts by their name, with an option to subsitute <user choice> font for missing character sets.

HTH - Stuart

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:16:36 GMT

Stuart you are the man! I know for a fact that different people have different font sets around here and if it does index by number that would deffinately be a problem. I would have thought it looked for name, but I guess not. I'll get everyone running on the same font set and hopefully it should solve the problem. Thanks.

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 19:47:07 GMT

I too just developed a similar problem. It just started a week or so before I upgraded to 9 and it remains... I was using a couple of Zapf Dingbats arrow symbols in my Plotmaker Layout Book. I opened up a new book and my arrows were changed to text characters and the Zapf Dingbats font is not recognized by Plotmaker. I am on Mac OS 10.3 and have been for some time. I check my Font Book, and the font is on and recognized by other software. My work-around was to find a different symbol in Wingdings3. It was a pain, but now it works. I never did discover the right solution. O well, production goes on...

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 22:36:24 GMT

As I recall, OSX.3.5 (and earlier) has known bugs related to the zapf characters. Your problem may stem from the OS, rather than AC. Try upgrading your OS to 10.3.6.

Just a thought,
Wes

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:54:50 GMT

Weston wrote:
As I recall, OSX.3.5 (and earlier) has known bugs related to the zapf characters. Your problem may stem from the OS, rather than AC. Try upgrading your OS to 10.3.6.

Just a thought,
Wes

Thanks for the input Weston. You filled me with inspiration and hope... until I checked my system: I'm running Mac OS X 10.3.6 (7R28).

My "make it work" solution involved a frustrating hour of "what's happened here?!?" detective work followed by a half hour of editing my template. Problem solved! (until I have to re-plot something older than 2 weeks )

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 07:29:43 GMT

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=4370

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 22:15:43 GMT

ALEXRVS wrote:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=4370

Thanks for the offer Alexrvs, but I think this is a "mac" thing, not windows. Anyway, as I indicated, I just worked around the problem by changing to a non-offensive font. All is well. Thanks again for your kind offer.

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

MSotero — Sun, 21 Nov 2004 21:43:21 GMT

Can GS HQ please comment about this issue with Zapf Dingbats?

I seriously doubt the problem is a OSX bug.
I only experience the problem using PM9 (not any other software) and in PM3x it still seems to work fine using OS 10.3.(anything). I use 10.3.6.
I like the font as it provides a character I use for a north arrow.

This is a disconcerting issue as I either need to keep using PM3 or I have to change about every drawing I've ever done and I really don't want to do that.

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 07:08:12 GMT

I have a similar font problem. I use a font that an architect I work with uses for everything. When I open his files the font is shown in brackets but goes to a default font. I have the font in every font folder but can't get to it. Have you ever found a solution (or even a reason for the problem)

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Vitruvius — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 05:41:51 GMT

I've had the same problem on a Mac - basically, all my Arial fonts have been converted to Arial Unicode (MS) after upgrading to V9. This isn't a problem I've had with any other upgrade of ArchiCAD (or Plotmaker for that matter).

This is an incredibly frustrating and time consuming problem. Any solutions out there?

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

Anonymous — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 10:26:47 GMT

Vitruvius wrote:
I've had the same problem on a Mac - basically, all my Arial fonts have been converted to Arial Unicode (MS) after upgrading to V9. This isn't a problem I've had with any other upgrade of ArchiCAD (or Plotmaker for that matter).

This is an incredibly frustrating and time consuming problem. Any solutions out there?

Here is a similar problem which may be of help to others. We have 3 machines, now all running AC9/PM9; the PMG4 holds all the files, with other machines accessing them over ethernet, and the user of this machine is Turkish.

Presenting Problem: in PM9, all fonts substituted with a Turkish version (supposedly) eg Impact became "Impact [Turkish]", Geneva became "Geneva [Turkish]" etc. The display of the fonts themselves were either a wide Arial type font or Courier.

Solution: On the PMG4 the System Preferences/International/ Languages/ Preferred Order had Turkish placed above English (because of accessing Turkish websites). This was reversed, and after a restart the problem was mostly resolved, with each font brought in correctly.

Remaining problem & comment: One font, New Berolina MT is moved vertically. This seems to be to do with the leading having been changed from 69.7% in PM3.1 to 100% in PM9. This therefore either needs to be moved, or the leading changed. But there is something strange about the display of the font, since 101% leading makes it jump to the correct location, much further than the 1% difference warrants.

HTH

Re: Fonts Changing Mysteriously

MSotero — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 20:39:15 GMT

Having tried a number of things I'm still perplexed. Nothing mentioned here changes anything for me so far.

If you do a new & reset of PM or AC it'll completely drop certain fonts like Zapf Dingbats from menu. And you'd think things would be working at this point, however it isn't so.

If you:
1) Try to copy and paste from another application (all I tried seem to recognize all fonts) into AC or PM, then certain characters will drop out. Substituting an empty box or something. You'll need to finalize the text onto the sheet to see the actual result.

2) If for instance, you try to use Wingdings 3 (something in the default font menu of AC & PM), what you type in the text dialog box may or may not remain the same character or even the same font family once the text is finally entered onto the drawing. Using the Insert Symbol option is an easy way to see this.

3) If you use Edit/Search & Replace Text... in AC you might be able to change the problematic character to something else (even if this is an unfortunate option). However, if you have a lot of stuff in PM like me, you're can't fix it quickly because PM doesn't have Search & Replace Text.

4) If in PM you use Find & Select to try to isolate the problematic fonts and then try to paste them into AC as group in hopes of using Search & Replace Text you can't because it is pasted as a bitmap image (seemingly no option of changing that that I could find anyhow).

So at this point.
Is this a bug?
If not, how doses one get it to work?
If one intends to copy and paste information from a word processor or something else with mixed fonts/characters into the new V9 text editor, how will you know which fonts/characters are going to come in correctly (you need to finalize the text onto the sheet, not the editor, to see what actually comes in)?

It would be a real help and kindness if GS would Please:
1) say what you know about this situation, especially if in fact this is a bug.
2) or explain what we need to do in order to overcome this situation.
3) or say if you're looking into it, or not, or something.