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Extended Characters

PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2005 2:24 pm
by Ken Sellick
Our office has switched over to the native Simplex font, the drafting symbols in the extended character menu are not supported.
Is there any macro that can allow the use of these?
I hope this already exists as a macro or some add-on.

THanks for your time
Ken Sellick

PostPosted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 10:54 am
by Philip Hart
As far as I know, the extended keyboard characters are supported only in: arcdr2gp, arcwy2gp, arcwy2hc, arcwy2lc, and hlv_tpx fonts. Since the extended keyboard characters are a function of the font definition, macros and/or other adds-in won't work to accomplish what you want.

Some third-party fonts may support them, you might check Cheapware for something that is similar to Simplex that has been written to support the extended keyboard characters.

Hope this helps.

PostPosted: Mon Dec 12, 2005 4:01 pm
by Miguel Palaoro
Hello Ken,

You can verify the usability for your jobs of this vectorial fonts. They are all improved with the ASCII Extended characters which are required for our use in portuguese and some other european languages.
As long as was possible, we headed to the TTF pattern, looking for a clear exchange among text fonts, independently from their source, Vectorial or TrueType.

Roman.chr (updated)
Orig.chr & orig2.chr (updated)
Avg_tp.chr (Avant Garde) nice font.
Hlv11-br.chr (derivated from HLV-850 updated)
Mini11BR.chr (same as Hlv11-br but with Roman's size)

Sorry, 'Simplex' is not among this fonts. Indeed, there is a reason for that: the only source code files made available for .CHR fonts were 5 original, since ever.

Perhaps a good idea could be the improvement of extended characters for all the other vectorial fonts. I guess could do it, with some time ahead, of course. We could start by asking Dave to make available the .SHP source files for the other fonts.

The file containing all our updated fonts can be downloaded here:
http://www.datacad.com.br/down/sup-dc/fontes/fontes.zip

Be my guess to download it. Hope it helps for something.

Thanks,
Miguel

PostPosted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 3:38 pm
by MtnArch
Some of this may be moot once V12 rolls out, as it is supposed to be able to use Acad .SHX fonts natively. Time will tell.

PostPosted: Tue Dec 13, 2005 5:41 pm
by Miguel Palaoro
MtnArch wrote:Some of this may be moot once V12 rolls out, as it is supposed to be able to use Acad .SHX fonts natively. Time will tell.

Hello Alan,
Not every (perhaps a few) of .SHX fonts from Acad supports Extended Characters.
If we really want to accomplish a good stage, there must be some extra effort into this direction, to increase the capabilities of all our vectorial fonts, making them closer to the full .TTF set of characters.

Please remember that the lack of compatibility is not only on special symbols, like Ø, ø, ½, etc.
The biggest challenge is to fit the other languages characters with accents, used extensively overseas for straight spelling.

Thanks,
Miguel