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Converting Fonts to Autocad

Anonymous
Not applicable
HI!,
I can't get my font translation to work.
Althoug I state the substitutions to fonts I wan't, When oppend in Autocad, all the non Arial fonts are standard font.


Any help on this one, please?

Best regards,

António Pina
21 REPLIES 21
Ben Odonnell
Contributor
Thomas wrote:
The key is of course the font conversion table.

What Graphisoft should do is to let users set up a tab-delimited text file table (easy in Excel, or any text editor) with the required data and make Archicad read that instead of the XML one.

The XML format lets you do many things, but it's not easy to create without dedicated tools.

Djordje, should I cross-post this one in the wishes section?
XML can be crated in any text editor. Simply by saving it with the extention .XML.
Ben O'Donnell
Architect and CTO at BIMobject®
Get your BIM objects from bimobject.com
Djordje
Ace
afpina wrote:
In this case, If I understand it rigth I'll have to have an Autocad licence to correctly convert to dxf or dwg?
No.
Now, obviously when someone in any kind of different activitie asks me for a dwg , and since I don't own a copy of autocad, I don't see myself spending hours, asking that person to make a template, and send it to me so maybe I can get my files right for him to see them.
That person SHOULD send you his average AutoCAD file, WITH the fonts (eTransmit in AutoCAD 2000 and newer, Pack and go before) if he wants to get anything like what he does. That is true even in AutoCAD-AutoCAD translation. Oh yes, there is such a thing!
Either archicad is dwg compatible (standalone) or is not. I need of course font-font conversion.
It is

Who uses which font (SHX or TTF) in which style, which pen for what layer and so on is exclusively local decision. If anybody expects you to follow a rule, he should tell you what that rule is, right?
Djordje



ArchiCAD since 4.55 ... 1995
HP Omen
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Djordje wrote:
That person SHOULD send you his average AutoCAD file, WITH the fonts (eTransmit in AutoCAD 2000 and newer, Pack and go before) if he wants to get anything like what he does. That is true even in AutoCAD-AutoCAD translation. Oh yes, there is such a thing!
Let me throw some fuel on the fire, because this is a topic that I have never figured out to my satisfaction and I don't think I'm alone.

In my case, the structural engineer doesn't really draft - so he has no "average" (or any kind) dwg files of his own. He wants me to send him a usable dwg that he can read, check dimensions, annotate a bit, and print.

The problem I have had in every version through 8.1 is that when I publish as dwg, my carefully selected TrueType fonts seem to get mapped to something ugly, or spaced incorrectly, in the dwg. The Mr. Hand font, a proportional font, is mapped to a fixed-width Courier-style font. Two separate engineering firms plotted drawings with this ugly Courier look - which is how it appears in VoloView Express. Bringing the same dwg back into PM, the font shows up as Arial.

Arial seems to get mapped from PM to a sans-serif font that is pretty close to Arial, but is wider, so text doesn't fit inside boxes any longer. Special characters from Wingdings come across incorrectly - one AC doc uses codes 131, 132 and 133 (the numbers 3, 4 and 5 inside circles); in the displayed dwg, these all appear as the code 63 symbol (a right hand holding a pen).


The aesthetic problem bugs me (a nice sheet now looks like shit) - but the real problem is that any special characters that I had used as part of the TrueType fonts now appear as strange garbage in AutoCAD (at least as shown by the free VoloView Express viewer). The resulting dwg is unusable without the AutoCAD user somehow replacing each of these goofy symbols with the AutoCAD-world-correct one. He may or may not catch each such screw up, thereby introducing inaccuracies or errors in the document.

In April 2002, the good Texans Steve Williams and Eric Batte generously tried to help me out with this on the old forum. Unfortunately, it didn't get me past the above problems.

So, could someone explain for us AC-savy but AutoCAD-ignorant types:

1. Is it not possible for AutoCAD to use TrueType fonts?

2. If it is possible, why don't our AC fonts go across as we have used them? If it is not possible, then how will it ever be possible to truly exchange documents via dwg?


Thanks!! 😉

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Djordje
Ace
Karl wrote:
1. Is it not possible for AutoCAD to use TrueType fonts?
Yes it is. Users don't do it. Volo View AFAIK does not use True Type.

Forget using any fancy font if the DWG is going to the consultant(s) - Arial, preferably narrow, that's it.
2. If it is possible, why don't our AC fonts go across as we have used them? If it is not possible, then how will it ever be possible to truly exchange documents via dwg?
Because they are not on the recipient's machine, that's why. If the True Type is not there, it cannot be displayed, and therefore your drawing is ... not censored , but not looking properly.

So if the font license agreement does not forbid it, send the TTFs along with the DWGs.

The other way is much easier, IF you have AutoCAD, as Autodesk supplies a set of True Type fonts that are exactly same as the standard AutoCAD SHX fonts.

No, I don't like it, either.
Djordje



ArchiCAD since 4.55 ... 1995
HP Omen
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator
Djordje wrote:

Volo View AFAIK does not use True Type.

Forget using any fancy font if the DWG is going to the consultant(s) - Arial, preferably narrow, that's it.
2. If it is possible, why don't our AC fonts go across as we have used them? If it is not possible, then how will it ever be possible to truly exchange documents via dwg?
Because they are not on the recipient's machine, that's why. If the True Type is not there, it cannot be displayed, and therefore your drawing is ... not censored , but not looking properly.
Thanks, Djordje. So, VoloView is part of the problem when I examine the dwg's on my machine (which of course has the fonts) before sending them... perhaps the fonts really are referenced in the dwg.

But, there still seems to be more at issue...since the proportional font (Mr Hand) is treated as a fixed-width font - and in the case of one consultant who I sent the TTF file to...he still got a Courier-like SHX font instead of Mr Hand.

There is dark magic and mystery in all of this...

Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Anonymous
Not applicable
This might also belong to the save DWG from PlotMaker topic, but here is how far I got:

Here is what I did: I created a reference/template DWG file, for simplicity I created the text styles named after the Architectural FontPack fonts. The fonts I used in AutoCAD were freeware truetype fonts, ArchiTEXT, ArchiTEXT Bold, CityBluePrint, Architect, but this is secondary since it can be changed in AutoCAD by editing the Style itself. Any freeware or generally available font will do it with more or less degradation of artistic integrity:) as you can see the Glasgow style uses Broadway

(screencapture 1)

Entering the font-styles conversion, (like MrHand MrHand-clever:) reading in, it converted fine into a pmk drawing, and translated into the AFP fonts as
expected (the AFP fonts extend a bit more over the rectangle, but that could be somewhat compensated by tweaking the autocad style.

Then I saved the pmk file back using the same translation file, and the original DWG as reference/template for the output...

(screencapture 2)
Groovy! .......

Details from PMK files look nice in AutoCAD:)

(screencapture 3)

So what's the problem, why the long nose:

BECAUSE on the LAYOUT it is a different song.
You don't have the SAVE AS option on the Layout, you can only PUBLISH these into DWG, but that doesn't seem to use the Font-Style conversion settings, the resulting dwg file only has the Standard textstyle and it is goofing off. Moreover: when the same dwg is read back as a drawing, the arrangement of the text blocks is messed up. NOT A PRETTY PICTURE.

(screencapture 4)

P.S: Looks like I only could attach one screenshot at a time, so to be continued...
ac_styles.png
Anonymous
Not applicable
screencapture 2...
ac_styles_PMK.png
Anonymous
Not applicable
screencapture 3...
Anonymous
Not applicable
screenshots 4...the ugly one...
layout.png
Anonymous
Not applicable
The only workaround I found so far:

Publishing DWF, reading into a PMK and saving as dwg WORKS, HOWEVER the layout gets translated into modelspace, so measurements are from paper, and
instead of 3'-0 it will be dimensioned as say: 1 1/8"

So if somebody wants a correct print, he/she is stuck with an out of scale flattened model space layout.
If somebody wants to edit (or measure dimensions of) the drawings, he/she is stuck with ugly text.