Fonts problem Migrating between Mac and PC

[Anonymous]

In our office we have 3 PCs (7) and 3 Macs (Lion and Mountain Lion). All computers are set to central european standards.
It is but impossible for us to migrate Archicad 16 PLNs from PC to Mac and
back.
We installed PC .ttf fonts from Windows to our Macs trough Font Book
(Swiss 721 mainly). But when we open PLNs on Masc all fonts are in brackets
(Arial, Swiss, you name it...)... If we change this fonts to proper Mac versions (namely those ttf-s that we copied from PCs), when we go back to PCs, all the fonts are in brackets and changed.
No such problems occurre in MS Office apps.

I know the Xreadcfg.txt story. But this is a one time solution and no use to us. We need to use same fonts on both platforms. We need to send files to other people outside the office.
What are we doing wrong?
How are you guys managing the PC Mac love thing?

[Da3dalus]

We are also having problems with the Swis721 font family. When we use Arial/Arial Narrow, it works great, but we don't want to use those fonts.

From my time-consuming experimentation, it seems to be a problem on fonts that append a style to them, like "Swis721 Cn BT Roman", as opposed to "Arial Narrow" which doesn't add the sub-font style "Roman".

I've even developed an AutoCAD DWG Template (as referenced in the DWG/DXF Translation Setup), complete with Font Styles that contain the Swis721 fonts. Instead of converting the font, they just creates a "GENERATED STYLE X" and substitutes an ugly SHX font.

I hate AutoCAD.

[Katalin Borszeki]

Here are a couple things to check on:

1. After installing a Font file, check if the font shows up in Notepad (Windows) or in TextEdit (Mac)
2. On a Mac create a text with the letter "A" only.
3. If this saved pln is opened on a pc, open the text settings the Font will be okay (no [ ] around the font and it will show as Western in the font script popup. If the opposite is done, from PC to Mac, with the font script set to Central European the Text Setting popup will have this: [MyFont Central European], the font encoding will be behind the text.

On a Mac, all font has one, and only one font script that defines it. On a windows a Font's different scripts are all defined as separate fonts. If the pc font script used is not the one that the Mac happens to use, the font will show as missing.

So our suggestion is to use the one font script that is shown in the text setting on the pc when the "A" (that originated from the Mac) is opened. Most probably it will be Western. The texts created with the text tool will not cause a problem, those are unicode compatible.

Inside one platform using a CE font or on Windows ce font script is a solution as well.

[Anonymous]

Hi!
I have the same problem now, after years.
I have a pln file using Arial Narrow and Calibri Light fonts, that was made on Windows.
Now I should do some smaller things, and as I use Macintosh, all those fonts are missing. I have though both font set up in my Mac, but Archicad misses the Central European version.
I am hopeful, that something might have happened in the last 4 years. So can I do something to fix this quick, so I shall not spend hours with replacing all the text? (text, measurements, eg.)

If not: which font is suggested to use in the future to avoid this?

Köszönöm!

[Daniel Kovacs]

Hi,

This is mostly due to how the different operating systems handle fonts, it is really hard to match them perfectly. I don't know if you've ever used Word or Power Point on both platforms, but in my experience they also struggle with this sometimes...

As Kata said before me, if you have the same fonts installed on both platforms, and you are using the western fonts on both platforms, it should be fine. In my experience this indeed works, but if you use fonts that are available on both platforms by default (eg. Regular Arial), then there's an even slimmer chance of issues like this. Avoiding system specific fonts is a good idea (like Helvetica, Calibri, etc.), but it works for me if I install the same on the other platform, and use the western version.

Kind Regards,