If I am in the wrong forum, my apologies.
I represent a company that uses a cloud hosted instance for ProjectWise. We are presently in the process of trying to adapt PDF Renditioning to work as a plotting option for our users.
I admit that I am very much still working through the learning curve on this process, but it seems that there are fewer options and configuration features with this printing platform than anything else I have seen.
My main issue is:
When configuring the system to create .PDF output for a specific project, I can not seem to get the fonts to come out correct.
Historically there have been issues where the program I am using to view the .PDF (Adobe Acrobat, Blue Beam Revu, Etc.) displays it wrong, or the computer being used does not have the right fonts installed.
However, in this case, I can get the same file looking correct using the same workstation with standard Bentley printing or with Print Organizer (Using ORD, MicroStation Etc), so I don’t believe it is the local computer.
It has been suggested that the cloud server hosting our files and processing the Renditioning requests might be the problem.
Again, if this is the wrong forum, please let me know and I’ll try another direction.
Either way, thanks for the consideration and assistance.
Are you using True Type fonts? If so and you typically load them into Windows itself instead of loading them with the workspace, you can work with Bentley hosting, i assume they'll install them on the server for you, but i'm not sure about that.
If you use managed workspaces and load fonts from there, Renditions should be using those already. I haven't yet tested our hosted renditions yet, but our on prem ICS server works with custom fonts fine as long as they are part of the workspace.
If you want to load them from a managed workspace, put them in a folder in your workspace and point the MS_FONTPATH variable at the folder. Don't specify any filenames at the end of that variable, only a folder.
Sorry for the delay...
Great idea, I'll give it a try.
Ron Koons EXP | BIM ManagerChicago, IL USA
I'm having a similar problem in the hosted environment as well. The latest I heard from Bentley tech support (2 months and still waiting) is that the hosted server needs the correct applications installed on the server for it to pick up the correct fonts. Since I have some projects in V8i, that's where I'm seeing the issues, and the hosted server only has MicroStation Connect out of the box. This reminds me of when I used to install the fonts on the server when I had one locally, so it must be related.
I have an open ticket with Bentley on this and they suggested that the fonts would need to be installed on the server; I'm assuming similar to adding fonts to windows on a normal computer.
However, we also found that the Workspace in question (Via CSB's) also did not have the fonts in the folder where the ttf files were housed for the project.
So once they (Bentley) actually fix Renditioning so it will not error out anymore, we're going to test it once more and then if it does not work, have them add the fonts.
The kick for me here is:
Between needing to add elements to servers we don't have access to, waiting three months for an answer, or having the entire system fail in general, how reliable is this... really!
Finally have a workaround of changing the file association to MicroStation from Geopak. We have multiple versions of Bentley software, so I it needs the generic MicroStation application association (server has MicroStation Connect on it) and won't work with a custom MicroStation V8i association. I noticed the same issue if the file is associated with OpenRoads. I have to tell our users to Open With... to open the files instead of double-clicking ( they can associate from there). I don't want to explain user association to each of them as that may botch the versions per project.