Custom Fonts

[kmarquis]

Our firm is looking to customize our drawings a little bit by having a font other than Arial. I changed all the families and the default text to a Windows font called Estrangelo Edessa. Weird name but it's a nice font and it wasn't anything I had to purchase. I sent pdf's to our consultants and all of the pdf's had little boxes wherever any text occured. I'm guessing this is because they don't own that font. Does anyone have any suggestions to solve this issue other than selecting a new font?

[LP Design]

2 options, although when my firm implemented Revit we abandoned a custom font we had been using in CAD to avoid exactly this kind of trouble.

1. Check your PDF print settings for "use system fonts only, not document fonts". It may be in slightly different places or named slightly differently depending on which version of adobe you are using. Either way, you WANT document fonts.
If that doesn't work,
2. Send out the font file whenever you start up a new project with a consultant. You might think that if you've used the firm before, they will already have what you sent them, but if someone new comes on the project it is a whole new ballgame. Remind them that they need to place that font in the Windows Fonts folder on the machine they are using to view the pdf. Several times I have dealt with a firm that uses (for lack of a better term) a rotating team. Whoever happens to be in the office at the time when the boss says "PRINT NOW!!11" gets the responsibility. They also have to have that font in their windows folder or it won't work.

3. I could be totally wrong :lol: Pdfs have always been kind of an oddity to me. Sometimes they behave, sometimes not.

Hope this helps,
-LP

[Overconstrained]

This is the reason that I firmly believe that drawing text fonts should always be something simple like Arial. At least with something like Arial, you can be 90% certain that whoever receives the PDF will see the drawing as intended.

We used to use an alternate but went back to a more common font because of this exact issue. I think it doesn't look good when you have to ask a consultant or client to install a new font on their machine just so they can read your drawings.

[MikeJarosz]

This issue comes up fairly often, especially when you want to put a corporate client logo on the title block. Some corporations (I'm thinking Chase Manhattan here, designed by Chermayeff-Geismar) hire graphic designers to do their logo in a custom font that is not available to mere mortals. How many times have you seen a fuzzy copy of the client's logo on a drawing, revealing that it was scanned at 80 dpi?

I always advise people to choose their fonts from the free fonts distributed with Windows. It doesn't always have to be Arial. If you are looking for something distinctive, chances are good that you will find something on that list, and you can be certain that anywhere you send your files, whether they are pdf, dwg or rvt, the recipient will already have that font. The problem doesn't always stop with drawings. The graphic design of correspondance, transmittals and other paperwork should be coordinated with your titleblock design. And Microsoft software behaves differently. When it encounters an unknown font, it substitutes another. If the user hasn't specified a default font substitute, you could get a suprise. I learned this the hard way. I had sent a report with the firm's logo to a consultant for them to add their work to it. It was a Word file and it had a copyrighted font that we purchased for our distinctive logo. I didn't think to send the font, which would have been a copyright violation anyway. The consultant then sent the file to the repro shop for 20 copies of this lengthy report. When the copies came back, Word had substituted a comic-book font for the company logo, on all 20 copies.

There is another option. Some software, like Photoshop, will allow you to type text in your selected font, then save the text string as a jpeg file. You can then embed the jpeg in your documents and the recipients won't need the actual font. Put the jpeg in your library and remember to send it with all your issues. This works much better than scanning. We had clients in the Middle East who had elaborate Arabic calligraphy in their logo. They furnished us with camera-ready artwork and we converted it to jpegs. You may have to lose a day sharpening them up in photoshop.

[dlpdi5b]

There are typically settings within your pdf printer that allow you to include the font within the pdf. But i agree with the discussion above that for simplicity, keeping to one of the more common windows fonts will make for a more reliable process.