topic Re: Helvetica Font - Text disappears when publishing to PDF in Documentation

Helvetica Font - Text disappears when publishing to PDF

LAL — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 13:07:10 GMT

Hi,

We are using macOS and ArchiCAD 24, and we have also encountered this issue in previous versions.

We use the Helvetica font that comes preinstalled on macOS. When we publish to PDF, all text using this font disappears.

Other users on the same teamwork file do not have this issue, and it does not affect other PLN files. This happens randomly, and it is not isolated to a specific macOS version

We would appreciate any help you can provide in resolving this issue.

Re: Helvetica Font - Text disappears when publishing to PDF

Lingwisyer — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 03:30:00 GMT

Single file on a single computer? Single file on multiple computers?

Re: Helvetica Font - Text disappears when publishing to PDF

LAL — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 04:16:02 GMT

Single file on a single computer

Strangely enough, this has happened to different files on different computers

There have been a couple of not very good workarounds - restarting the computers sometimes helps, in other instances, we had to reinstall the font

Re: Helvetica Font - Text disappears when publishing to PDF

Aaron Bourgoin — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 12:21:26 GMT

This occasionally happens to us. Different fonts. Re-starting the publishing computer and re-publsihing has, so far, solved the problem.

Re: Helvetica Font - Text disappears when publishing to PDF

Oleksandra Vakariuk — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:11:09 GMT

Hi everyone,

This issue came to our attention when one of the users reported it to technical support, so although it's probably not relevant anymore, I'd still like to share some notes here if anyone else runs into it in the future.

Since restarting the computer resolves the issue, it seems that there might be something wrong with the font cache.

By default, the Helvetica font comes in TTC format on macOS. We can use only TTF fonts directly in PDF export, other font formats are converted to TTF before being used in PDF and then stored in cache.

Based on this I can offer several recommendations:

Uninstall the default Helvetica font and install it in TTF format. This way, the issue should be resolved altogether.
You could also clear the font cache whenever the issue occurs. This would be a folder named "Font" at the location specified in the Work Environment > Special Folders > Cache Folder.
If you don't shut down your computer regularly (at least once a week), you might want to consider doing so as it might cause other issues as well.

Kind regards,

Oleksandra