The Font Farewell - .....Interoperability part 2

Last time I spoke on Naming Conventions but there is of course more to be done to really communicate.

We are talking about Fonts of course. How many of you MicroStation users heve not been frustrated over not having the right SHX font available and how many AutoCAD users have not been frustrated in relation to the RSC-fonts? The mere fact that AutoCAD cannot handle RSC-fonts should give us a hint on that we have a problem. The mere fact that both AutoCAD and MicroStation need to have extra merhods to install fonts should also tell us something. As a CAD users we want to have an easy road to travel and no extra hazzle. SHX fonts and RSC fonts do NOT provide this for us. True Type Font on the other hand do. Both AutoCAD and MicroStation can read them and they can be easily installed just as any font and all fonts will be in one place. I know Keith Bentley agrees as he himself wrote something on this a while ago. So let us sit down together with Autodesk and Bentley and agree to ban SHX and RSC right now! And if by chance some client really love the ancient look on one of the SHX or RSC fonts - let Autodesk and Bentley together create a Font Converter from SHX/RSC to TTF! And make in inhouse AutoCAD and MicroStation. Right now there is an old-fashioned converter in MicroStation from RSC to SHX - switch to RSC to TTF!!

  • On the surface, using ttf seems like a great thing but it has caused us HUGE headaches. With 3500 machines, making sure the same ttf files are on each machine is not an easy task for sure. What is one designer likes his "jimsbest.ttf" font for designing but when he sends that file to the consultant, it picks some default that doesn't look correct?

    We supply all our consultants rsc files with fonts and linestyles and we are set. With ttf, users are free to use whatever and hope others have it. If there were an easy way to limit what ttfs a user could pick, that would be great but so far, if it's on their machine, they will use it. Including some purchased handwritten ttfs a user bought to make Christmas cards. They showed up on a plan set and screwed everything up. There needs to be an ability to limit ttf if they are going to be used. Maybe a variable that only allows named ttfs.

  • Good post.  I agree with your sentiments, but I think a solution may soon be presenting itself.  With the agreement between Autodesk and Bentley to exchange software libraries, it will be inevitable that each program will be able to read each other's file formats perfectly - which would also include supporting files like fonts.  

    However, yours seems the best solution.  If both programs can read TTF fonts, use one of them as a CADD stabndard and be done with it.