Joseph, thanks for your PM, I really did check this thread earlier but decided it was too complex for me - the subject, that is. You got me here, I'm an easy target for flattery!
The background problem is that this process is very sparsely - and erroneously - documented. The Help files are better than the Reference Guide, you might check that.
Also, Autocad nowadays uses TrueType fonts by default for MTEXT entries (that is, More Than one line of tEXT
😉 This means that Autocad installs all its standard fonts in both .shx and TT formats in Windows. (The TT fons reside in Window's font folder)
Since MacOSX can utilize any Windows TrueType font like its own, this reduces the problem. I for one have the TrueType versions of all Autocad's standard (shx) fonts installed. You can get them from any Autocad user or by installing Autodesk's free DWG viewer (Windows only - use BootCamp on Mac). This should eliminate most needs for font mapping.
I really can't say what's happening in your case.
I think that Archicad on the Mac defaults to Geneva when it can't find the target font it wants. You can change that in the Miscellaneous section of the DWG translator setup. It looks like Arial (which is a rip-off of Geneva, which in turn is a rip-off of Helvetica).
I would guess there might be some small error in the
font naming on either side of the conversion table. This is particularly problematic with PS (PostScript) fonts, since for each font they come in styles (bold, italic etc) who reside in separate files. TrueType fonts have all styles in one file.
Also, I'm not completely sure about what Autocad 'styles' mean as opposed to 'fonts'. I notice your font names on the Autocad side are complete with file name extensions .shx
You might try to just remove the extensions, since if your DWG has font mappings to TT fonts, they would not work. And start by having only one-to-one mappings to isolate the problem.
Then try setting the conversion table in your translator to some other font that you've got. If you get it to work that way, it's your font that's the issue. You might try getting a TrueType version of your Postscript target font and try that instead. There are PS to TT converters out there, Google is your friend.
There are other issues that might affect this as well.
a) As you might have noticed, Archicad
only fully respects your translator's settings when you
Merge or
Xref a DWG. If you Open it or Place it as a Drawing, Archicad doesn't give a shit for your carefully customised translator tables, even if you've set them in the default translator. I've only got very incomplete and unsatisfactory explanations from GS for this. It seems that the DWG conversion department at GS doesn't care about what the Archicad user in want of good controllable communications with Autocad users need. That the default translator should work regardless of how you import your DWG is beyond their horizon. So only Merge or Xref for the time being.
b) Also, in your
Add-Ons folder, you've got a file called
XReadCfg.txt.
(It was last changed the 6th of Sept 2004. It's older than the one I got with Archicad 9, but not as old as the one I got with Archicad 10, which is from 1999. My Archicad 7 is from 2002, so I guess that would be about Archicad 5 - I haven't kept older versions installed so I'm not sure. Didn't someone brag about Archicad being "completely rewritten' by Archicad 8? )
Whatever,
this file is supposed to rule the default font conversion. You might try to edit it. N B that I guess explicit settings in your translator should override the settings in this file. However, I have serious doubts that this file works. Many of it's options simply don't apply anymore - they are ancient relics from the Classic Mac OS's times.
c) So for the last option: In the
Miscellaneous section of the
DWG translator setup
you can set a
"
Font Conversion File: Even when one-by-one font-to-style matching is possible, a conversion dictionary may be necessary for Font Name conversion."
to quote the Help file.
It also says:
"A default version of this dictionary is installed during ArchiCAD installation. It is country- and platform-dependent but otherwise standard. You may wish to duplicate and alter the default dictionary."
So I went searching for this file. By the help of GS local Swedish support (they are very helpful) I found out that the default dictionary mentioned
is in fact the Xreadcfg file mentioned above!
Just one snag, though: The Help text says:
"you can define a Font Conversion File (it is a file with *.xml extension)"
. So my efforts to edit the Xreadcfg
.txt file didn't help much, because Archicad refused to let me select it in the Miscellaneous setup!
I went to GS local support again, and after a while Ben Odonnell turned up with an FontConv
.xml file. Completely different from the above, and very complex at that, I haven't been able to gather enough energy to make it work. But if you have this need for a lot of files, you might want to give it a try. A tip: There is a free code editor for OSX called Smultron. Download it and use ti to edit the xml files. Much easier than a text editor.
http://smultron.sourceforge.net/
Obviously, the guys at GS's DWG conversion development have work to do! I do hope they fix this in AC12. The least they can do is to get the installed files to be consistent with the help text!
I'm attaching the Xreadcfg.xml file in an additional post. Please note that before you test any of this, do full backups of both your programs and your data!
And do report back if you get it to work!
AC4.1-AC26SWE; MacOS13.5.1; MP5,1+MBP16,1
