Fonts in Illustrator vs ArchiCAD

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I'm doing some work for someone who uses Adobe Illustrator - translating the artwork into DWG and merging it into ArchiCAD.

I'm using an Adobe font family - Frutiger - and note that what I see in Illustrator and what I see in ArchiCAD paper space are different. Frutiger 67 Bold Condensed looks too bold and too condensed in AC.

The font size is also jiggy. What is specified in Illustrator as 12pt text needs to be 8pts (approx) to fit into the same space.

Any typographic wizards out there who would care to respond? I'm stumped.

[Thomas Holm]

Not sure, but AFAIK Autocad's DWG format doesn't support system fonts the normal way, it has 'styles' that Archicad maps to your system fonts if you've set the translator to do so. and you have to have the same fonts installed on you system, the Dwg format doesn't embed fonts like PDFs do.

Needs to be checked, it can be that your Archicad uses for example the non-bold Condensed font and Bolds it instead of mapping to the CondensedBold variety - that would make the appearance wrong.

[Aaron Bourgoin]

Thanks Thomas,

The font map did not come along automatically in the dwg.

I might no t have noticed this if it had. I had to open the original in illustrator and use an inspector to determine which font, size, etc.

Frutiger is a big font family. Maybe it just doesn;t play nice with ArchiCAD as you suggest. I guess I was naive to think that my font issues of old would go away when I moved back to the Apple platform.

[Thomas Holm]

Aaron wrote:
...Frutiger is a big font family. Maybe it just doesn;t play nice with ArchiCAD as you suggest. I guess I was naive to think that my font issues of old would go away when I moved back to the Apple platform.

The issue is that you're using a still very much non-Apple DWG format as an intermediate.

You mention Archicad Paper space, I guess you mean that you dragged the DWG into an Archicad layout.

If you don't need to edit the file, you might just as well drag the Illustrator file (which should be saved as a PDF) directly into Archicad and check if it works better. if saved as a PDF, the font should be included with the file.

Also, you can create a font translation table in your DWG translator. You need to check that the actual font names match precisely — re-reading your original post, where you call it "jiggy" I'm thinking Archicad, not finding what you intended, has substituted the font your friend is using for its old bit-mapped screen representation.

The old MacOS (9 and previous) needed bit-mapped fonts for the screen. They were automatically exchanged for the real Postscript print fonts at print time. They have slightly different names, like Frutiger Cond Bold might be substituted at print time with Frutiger LTStd-Bold Cn, for example. Both kinds are found within Adobe's font packs, but those are still different for the Mac compared to what's sold to PC/Windows. (that is an Adobe issue!)

So first you need to check that you have the right Postscript print font installed in your system, not just the bit-map font.

Then, if the above isn't enough, you need to check that's what's specified in your font translation table, because when you go through DWG, the bitmap-printfont connection is lost, and Archicad just does what it's told, finds and uses the font you've named. If you name the print font instead, that should work, because MacOSX will display and print whatever you throw at it!

Just my 2¢.