Fonts a-changing on their own

[Anonymous]

We have been having a continuing problem with fonts changing in our files. Sometimes it happens between saving and opening the file again, sometimes it happens when you change views, sometimes just when zooming!

iMac 24" 2.8Mhz, Mac OS 10.4.11, ArchiCAD 11 latest build:
Fonts in text, dimensions, and sometimes symbols (i.e. elevation tags) changes to "Geneva" (although not really - sometimes the kerning is so small the characters overlap).

iMac 24: 2.8Mhz, Mac OS 11.5.4, ArchiCAD 11 latest build:
Fonts in text, dimensions, and sometimes symbols (i.e. elevation tags) changes to "Cooper Black, Italic".

iMac 20: 2.4Mhz, Mac OS 11.5.4, ArchiCAD 11 latest build:
Fonts in text, dimensions, and sometimes symbols (i.e. elevation tags) changes to "Cooper Black, Italic".

This is really annoying when the text changes to Cooper Black - who wants Cooper Black on their drawings? Does anybody have any ideas how to stop this?

I have already deleted the ArchiCAD cache files and the system and user font caches several times - no luck.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[Dwight]

What happens when you disable Cooper Black?


This is probably a coding confusion via Microsoft... do you have Office installed?

[Anonymous]

I'll try this, too.

I think I'm getting close to solving this one...

I just noticed two things:

One is the font option in font pull-down menus of "[DEFAULTFONT]" - which seems to be telling me that AC cannot find a default font (although I have no idea where one sets this).

Two is that all the DXF-DWG translators were "set" to Arno Pro Bold Italic somehow (and today my AC is changing fonts to this font instead of Cooper - and this is even though the translators were originally set to "Helvetica"). I can change them all EXCEPT the Special Built-in Translator which is locked. This may be the culprit, but I cannot get to it to make any changes.

That the DXF-DWG translators are causing this does make a bit of sence - as the problem has only shown-up recently and we only recently have been doing some xref and placing of DXF and DWG files from product manufacturers into our AC files...

Ideas?

I'll try disabling Arno and see what happens.

UPDATE: Disabling Arno sets all "strange" fonts to Cooper Black Std Italic again. It seems to me that AC is not managing fonts very well...

[Karl Ottenstein]

Never heard of this one before, so wouldn't be too quick to blame AC.

Any font inside square brackets is missing. You would see [Arial] if somehow Arial was uninstalled from your machine. ArchiCAD does not have or look for a font named DEFAULT, so [DEFAULT] suggests that the file or template might have come from someone who set that as the font name for something to key the user in to change it perhaps?

Yet, the locked translator font problem - as well as the switching fonts - surely indicates a font mapping problem on your Mac.

Googling on 'leopard font cache problems' shows that there are others with font problems.

Have you tried running Onyx (free) and cleaning the font caches? (And/or perhaps go to the Onyx Automation tab and run all maintenance and cleaning options?)

Karl

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I've cleared the font cache a number of times, but it continues to happen. Even when ArchiCAD puts brackets around a font - saying it cannot find it - all other applications can (Word, FontBook, etc.). It is possible the [DEFAULTFONT] may be as you said as I did get the file from another architect - one who has never experienced this issue or knows what [DEFAULTFONT] is supposed to be or how it got there (I suspect it is embedding in some custom object).

For the most part I've solved this by changing all the translators I can to convert unknown fonts to the office standard. Occasionally I still see [FUTURA] in the font pull-down menu, but now the text is still showing and printing Futura even if ArchiCAD doesn't think it is there.

Scott