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#68829 by John Daglish
Sat May 07, 2016 9:14 am
I am using Paragraph text with some special characters such as a linked oe œ (alt 0230 in my international RomanS font).
In the text input box, the special character is not visible - there is a blank space but when OK'd it is placed on the layer and is visible.
Can this be corrected so it shows up in the text input box?
#68830 by Roger D
Sat May 07, 2016 10:12 am
that would be a nice improvement, esp when using the fractcions sometimes it's hard to find the correct space/invisible character.
#68831 by jimgoodman
Sat May 07, 2016 11:14 am
I agree 110%!
#68834 by Neil Blanchard
Sat May 07, 2016 4:17 pm
Hi John,

That is a matter of the font that is used to show the text in the dialog box vs the font used in the drawing.

I don't know if this is fixable by Dave G, or it takes a change in Windows? But at the moment, we have to live with it, I think.
#68836 by joshhuggins
Sun May 08, 2016 3:17 am
You can use a program like FontCreator from High Logic to do this as long as the characters you are wanting to edit are not in the range of 127-160 which are invalid/protected/unused in Windows typically (as far as I know, if someone knows how to edit/add them please share :) ) For your case, this is how I would do it. Create 2 copies of the corresponding TTF font you want to edit. One to edit and one for a safe backup incase things go wonky on you. ;) Go up to File, Open, Font File, and load a copy of your TTF font. Go up to View, and set the Display Format to Decimal. This will make locating the font easier by it's Unicode/ASCII# when you float your cursor over them. I then like to select the Unicode branch in the table to the left as it helps group the characters into their respective branches and it will kind of give you an idea of the structure of the font. For 0230, it falls under Latin-1 Supplement. To start editing the character, just double click on it. It will open up on the screen and add a tab to the top of the screen (you'll want to return here in a minute).

Next what works really well and saves a lot of time is to open up another existing TTF font that has the symbol you want already (via File Open, Installed Font or Font File). Often I'll use an architectural font so it will have similar styling. Just make sure to tweak the font enough so you are not infringing on anybodies copyrights. Locate the character you want to copy, and double click on it to open it up. Use Ctrl+A to select all of the parts of the character, and then Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard. Close that character's editing window. Use the tab at the top of the screen to return to the editing window of the character you are editing for your main font. Ctrl+V to paste in the parts from the other font. Boom instant character start point! Next use your mouse the to select parts of the character you want to edit. You can use the Edit Tools at the top of the screen to adjust points similar to how Datacad polyline points work. It takes a bit of playing with to get the hang of things. Often "holes" in characters are often shapes that have been right clicked on and have the "Change Direction" value added to them to make them act like negatives or voids when placed over other shapes. I'm sure I don't have all the terminology and tricks down like the pros but that's should be about all you need to get things tweaked the way you want. Save the font. Copy and replace the existing TTF font in C:\Windows\Fonts, reboot and then give it a whirl. That should be it.

As for the characters for 0127-0160, the only way I know to work around it is to abandon those characters going forward, add in new characters to the SHX fonts outside that range, preferably in the positions that more closely represent their real world counterparts, and then adding the same characters in the TTF counterparts, then use those new characters for your future projects. I don't know what the character range/limit is for SHX files? Can someone chime in and let me know? This post kind of has me wanting to finish mapping these out now. :P Also does anyone have access to the SHX2SHP and SHP2SHX tools? Is this still the best thing to use for working with SHX files? Or maybe we should just switch to all TTF's and say the heck with it? :twisted:
Attachments
fontedit.jpg
#68989 by Ted B
Tue May 24, 2016 8:33 am
I haven't used .SHX-fonts in years for Datacad. TTF-fonts generally work fine as long as the font has the characters you want.

You may want to experiment with 'filled' vs. 'outline' just to see the impact on your screen-graphics driver, and your plotter/printer drivers. I have noticed perceptible performance issues depending on the device drivers and the font and font-properties selected.

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