AC11 on Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard - [WORKING] font problem

Anonymous · ‎2009-11-20

We used to operate AC11 on Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard.

We often receive drawings from consultants on MicroStation/AutoCAD (.dgn and .dwg) that we open to view in AC11. These drawings have text that uses the own softwares' proprietary fonts, which ArchiCAD replaces with the closest match (ie. [WORKING] font) when you open the files in AC11.

No problems with it.

A few days ago, we upgraded to Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, and things started to behave strangely. Where the text using fonts labelled as [WORKING] in AC11 used to be legible, now I get rectangles for each syllable. I would then have to select all the text and replace the font with something in the list like ARIAL, for example.

This is bad because sometimes we have to open to check many files and repeating this operation is not good at all.

An interesting note is that the label for the Elevation markers in default AC11 template (eg. East Elevation, West Elevation etc.) turn into rectangles too, where the font used is [ARIAL WESTERN].

This problem is not evident in AC13, as it seems that AC13 is able to replace these AutoCAD fonts, albeit with a strange choice of replacement (I got some fancy cursive font instead of the usual ARIAL-like looking one).

Is there a solution for this? We are not planning on migrating on AC13 just yet, and would be sticking with AC11. Thanks!

Barry Kelly · ‎2009-11-20

As you have discovered any font name in Archicad in [brackets] is not a real font but Archicad substitutes something else for it (ususally Arial) so that it appears correctly on screen.

It doesn't do this well it seems in Snow Leopard.

A couple of things you can try.
If your consultants are using True Type fonts then you can install the same font on your machine.

Or maybe you could ask your consultants to use a true type font that you do have?
I think most CAD programs can use true typ fonts - I know Autocad can.
But this may be too much trouble for them.

Your best bet then is to set up a translator that you can use when you open one of there drawings.
In the translator you can set up a list of Archicad fonts and their corresponding foreign CAD font name.

The translator can also set up text scale, line types, colours, how blocks are imported and a whole host of other things if you want to spend the time to set it up.

Converting fonts, layers, line types and colours only really works well if both you and your consultant have very rigid CAD standards and don't just invent new layers and line types etc. on the fly for every job.

Barry.

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Anonymous · ‎2009-11-20

Hi Barry

Yes, I feel it would be a lot of trouble to request for all our consultants to use TTF just because of us, so that option would not be possible.

I would guess that the best bet would be to set the translator to re-define the fonts when I open them. The trouble is that every consultant uses a different font...we have as many as 10 to 20 different consultants sending us drawings from time-to-time...

Actually, I am more concerned with how ARIAL WESTERN, which was available in 10.5 Leopard is not unavailable in 10.6 Snow Leopard, and that a default font is not even recognizable

Anonymous · ‎2010-01-14

Shingo did this ever get resolved?

I am now having the same problem and wondering how you resolved it?
Was it the translator?

For us the Arial Western is a big deal.
However, we switched from windows to mac.
Other fonts in archicad I found to be those rectangular blocks you were talking about I replaced by dragging and dropping from windows to mac and it switched.

The Arial Western is another problem though.

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