DXF file - glyphs instead of text in other apps - why? 1

[MakeItSo]

Hi, hope someone can give me a hint about this!

I am not an AutoCAD user, but I need to process AutoCAD files. We receive them as DXF and haven't encountered problems - until lately:
No matter, if we open the file in Adobe Illustrator, Visio 2002 or TurboCAD Professional, the drawing shows up fine, but the text displays (partially) as glyphs or as a seemingly random sequence of letters.

Opening the drawing in Visio 2000 shows everything fine, but it is opened as an image, so no text can be edited.

It seems to me like a font problem, i.e. that some text has been entered with some strange font that cannot be recognized. However I do not get any conversion warnings in either app.

Have any of you encountered such a problem?

Hope this description was clear enough.


Thanks for any feedback,
Andy

Andreas Galambos
EDP / Technical Support Specialist
(andreas.galambos@bowneglobal.de)
HP:

http://www.andygalambos.de

 

[MakeItSo]

Still a problem - no idea. Just to boost this to the top...

 

[TCARPENTER]

Andy,

This may be a long shot but - take a look at the dxf file in either a text editor, (Word, Notepad etc.) or even Excel. DXF files are nothing more than ascii text files and they can be edited. When you have the file open in your chosen text editor, search for the string "STYLE" (no quotes). You will probably turn up something like this:

STYLE
70
1
0
STYLE
2
STANDARD
70
64
40
0
41
1
50
0
71
0
42
10.68447
3
SIMPLEX.SHX

The important part of this is the "SIMPLEX.SHX" this is the font file used to generate the fonts within the AutoCAD drawing. You might try changing this to a TTF font on your system - i.e., Arial.TTF. You'll need to change every occurance of SIMPLEX.SHX to find the culprit. Since you're not an AutoCAD user, SIMPLEX.SHX is only one possibility for font files used by AutoCAD - in short, after you locate the style section - you may find something like ROMANS.SHX, ARIAL.TTF, SANSERIF.PFB - note the extensions used (SHX, TTF, or PFB (postscript)). In any case, you may find the font file already pointing to a font system already on your computer. Save the file as a text file (with the extension DXF), and then try importing it again and see if your problem has cleared up.

Hope that helps

Todd

 

[MakeItSo]

Hi Todd.

Tried it out - but haven't found any occurence of postscript, SHX or other font formats.
I have found two occurences of font "Kanji" and "Takegama", which I have replaced with "Arial", but no effect.

I assume, the files have not been exported correctly, since I have found one line in the text, which looks quite like one of that glyph lines:
‚R|‚l‚Si‚k‚d‚m‚f‚s‚g‚P‚Rj

so I assume, this is simple file corruption. But thanks for the STYLE hint!

 

[Durnel]

If you have TurboCad just open the DWG file natively. Don't translate the information into a DWF file if you don't have to. Let TurboCAD translate it into something it KNOWS is usable. Don't take exports when the real thing will do.

You will most likely be able to do any conversions you need with TurboCAD. AutoDesk still has to see the light concerning accurate translation in my opinion.

 

[MakeItSo]

Hi Durnel,

thanks for your reply. However, my problem was not export to dxf and losing information. I received the files I needed to process as dxf.
Latest Status: I was finally sent the original dwf files. Guess what? They displayed well, but I could not extract the text, it all came out as junk.
You won't believe what was finally the reason for all this:
The text was none at all, but embedded graphics...

Anyway, appreciate your tip! ;-)

Cheers,
Andy