Disappearing text - small fraction dimensions

[Anonymous]

Hey Everybody,

I've searched this forum and google exhaustively for an answer to this problem, to no avail.

In plotmaker I am getting text that does not appear where it should. You can see the text handles where there should be text, but the text inside is missing. And curiously, this only affects dimension strings where the fractions are small, and the fraction is not preceded by anything.

Example:
2 ¼" or 0 ½" or 3'-1 ¼" will show up fine
¼ or ½ will not show up
(See attached screenshot)

I know that for a quick fix, I could turn off small fractions, or precede all dimensions smaller than an inch by 0, but I'm strapped for space on some of my drawings and I really need to have the smaller fractions. It's frustrating that this doesn't work!

Anyone have any insight into this? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

More info:
Fractions show & Print properly in ArchiCAD 8.1 (PC)
Fractions show properly when I open the plotmaker file in plotmaker (PC)
Fractions do not show properly when I view the layout book or print/plot the layout book (PC)
The font used is Avant Garde (TTF)

[Erika Epstein]

I haven't tried it out, but in XP in the character map
(START, ALL PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES, SYSTEM TOOLS)
there are symbols for :
¼ ALT + 0188
½ ALT + 0189
¾ ALT + 0190

That is where I just pasted those fractions from.

You might try pasting them in as a work-around.

[Laszlo Nagy]

Are they missing also when you print/plot? Or are they missing only on the Layout? I can see they are not missing in the PlotMaker drawing. Are they still missing when you Rebuild the placed drawing on the Layout?

[Anonymous]

I figured it out.. I was able to get the text to reappear under a specific condition.

If you re-import any of the Plotmaker files in question, the small dimension fractions appear. The problem begins when I resize the drawings frame to crop the drawing. If any text box or portion of a text box is outside of this cropped frame, it prevents lone small fractional dimensions from appearing. Hence my problem.

I hope I explained that in a way that makes sense to everybody. I'm going to contact ArchiCAD and submit a bug report

[Laszlo Nagy]

That's good that you managed to pinpoint the problem. It is much easier for them, too, to fix it.

[Anonymous]

So we just transitioned to ArchiCAD 10 from verision 8.1, and guess what? the fractions are still disappearing!!! Only this time, there is no way to adjust the placed drawing's frame to make the fractional dimensions re-appear.

<rant>
I can't believe that 2 versions later this problem hasn't been addressed. So far we have a list of major drawbacks to working with ArchiCAD 10 (vs 8.1) and now we've just added another one. ArchiCAD 10 is quickly becoming a 4 letter word at our office.
</rant>

Sorry about that, now that I've vented, has anyone else experienced this problem? It happens for us consistently on all of our workstations - Windows & Macs.

[TomWaltz]

Have you reported it as a bug to your reseller?

[Anonymous]

TomWaltz wrote:
Have you reported it as a bug to your reseller?

I had 3 years ago, but I'm going to call him again now once I find his contact info.

Update:
Well I just talked to him and will be submitting this thread to him via e-mail. I will follow up with any info that this generates

[Anonymous]

This problem has been answered elsewhere in the forum.

(search: dimensions superscript missing)

Basically, it is a known bug in AC10 and you need to change your dimension preferences, under project preferences to either not do superscripting or to display the Zero inches in front of a superscripted fraction. Or you can do the work around of finding all your problem dimensions and retyping them as a custom text value (you must type it in the main text area-not the superscript area) and then change the point size so it looks right with everything else. For some reason I decided this was the least bitter pill (today).