Fonts Changing Mysteriously

[Anonymous]

Ok, I am at a total loss on this one. I have 3 designers that say their dimension fonts and other text fonts apparently changed to Wingdings all on their own. They changed them to a standard Arial font, saved, closed, and opened again and the fonts were back to wingdings. If this was one person I would assume user stupidity, I mean user error. However, being that it is 3 separate people on 3 separate machine, on 3 different drawings something is definitely wrong.

Does anyone have any clue on how to start tracking down this kind of problem, and has anyone else experienced this type of issue before?

We are running AC 81 R2 on W2k.

[Jacek]

Microsoft Poltergeist

[henrypootel]

There was a problem with this in teamwork files when using the first release of 8.1 r2.
Is this the version you have?
If so, you need to get the R2C patch on your machines(contact your dealer or download it)

[Anonymous]

We are running 81 R2C. And have been running it for a little while now. This problem seem to just pop up in the past week. Any chance this is some form of virus, or are we just seeing Microsoft Gremlins at work.

[Anonymous]

AFAIR this is due to a feature (yeah right) in Archicad.

Fonts (for styles, for measurements, etc.) are referenced not (as mebbe they could and should be) by their NAME but instead, by their number. At a guess they are indexed alphabetically.

So if some designer on another computer loads (deliberately or accidentally (ie. during the course of loading another program)) new fonts this can create disparities between computers.

The work-a-round for now is to ensure that all office computers have the same set of fonts (yeah great).

The future will mean that Archicad will refer to fonts by their name, with an option to subsitute <user choice> font for missing character sets.

HTH - Stuart

[Anonymous]

Stuart you are the man! I know for a fact that different people have different font sets around here and if it does index by number that would deffinately be a problem. I would have thought it looked for name, but I guess not. I'll get everyone running on the same font set and hopefully it should solve the problem. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I too just developed a similar problem. It just started a week or so before I upgraded to 9 and it remains... I was using a couple of Zapf Dingbats arrow symbols in my Plotmaker Layout Book. I opened up a new book and my arrows were changed to text characters and the Zapf Dingbats font is not recognized by Plotmaker. I am on Mac OS 10.3 and have been for some time. I check my Font Book, and the font is on and recognized by other software. My work-around was to find a different symbol in Wingdings3. It was a pain, but now it works. I never did discover the right solution. O well, production goes on...

[Anonymous]

As I recall, OSX.3.5 (and earlier) has known bugs related to the zapf characters. Your problem may stem from the OS, rather than AC. Try upgrading your OS to 10.3.6.

Just a thought,
Wes

[Anonymous]

Weston wrote:
As I recall, OSX.3.5 (and earlier) has known bugs related to the zapf characters. Your problem may stem from the OS, rather than AC. Try upgrading your OS to 10.3.6.

Just a thought,
Wes

Thanks for the input Weston. You filled me with inspiration and hope... until I checked my system: I'm running Mac OS X 10.3.6 (7R28).

My "make it work" solution involved a frustrating hour of "what's happened here?!?" detective work followed by a half hour of editing my template. Problem solved! (until I have to re-plot something older than 2 weeks )

[Anonymous]

http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=4370