Revit 2016 Arial Narrow

[Craig_L]

So just checking out 2016 version, and Arial Narrow is missing!
So that means all my labels, actually my entire template, is now cr@p.

Why would arial narrow no longer be there?

Anyone else experienced this, and any reason arial narrow isn't included in the 2016 install?

[DaveP]

Revit doesn't install fonts.
It only uses what's on your computer.
Contrary to popular opinion, Arial Narrow is not a standard Windows font.
Regular Arial comes with Windows, but Narrow gets installed with Microsoft Office, not Windows.

[MikeJarosz]

There have been numerous discussions about fonts over the years here at AUGI. Look some of them up. A number of them are by me. As Dave points out Arial Narrow is Office, not Windows.

My advice is never to use any font that is not shipped with Windows. You have discovered why. I know a firm that obsessively coordinated their correspondance, letterheads title blocks, drawing anotation, business cards, even their marketing brochures around a single, distinctive typeface that they paid for. They created a nightmare for their joint ventures, reproduction providers even just taking work home. And since most software these days will substitute a Windows font for unknown fonts, they sometimes lose control over the final appearance. Autodesk checks that Windows fonts will work with their software. They cannot check every font that's out there, for obvious reasons.

My advice is to stick with Windows Arial and use Revit to squeeze it to 90% width factor or whatever suits you.

[MikeJarosz]

I happen to have stumbled onto a good example of font substitution and what can go wrong when you don't use Windows fonts. We hired a graphic designer to design the interior signs for a project. Nothing fancy, just lavatory signs, exit signs, usual stuff. Of course as graphic designers, they have catalogs from every type foundry in the world and they use them all the time. They do not want to be bound by Windows-approved fonts only. They sent us dwg files using their designer-approved fonts, which they have valid licenses for and we do not. Here's what we got when we loaded the files into Acad:

[bt.commenter343255]

I never know Arial Narrow was not Windows!

Just always had office on my machine forever, and it never occurred to me that it was not part of the base Arial install.

And I totally agree that staying from the common fonts can really create problems down the road.

[Duncan Lithgow]

Here's what we got when we loaded the files into Acad:

Still, that's more interesting than most signs. I like it, well sort of!:lol:

[patricks]

We switched our fonts a couple of years ago to Calibri, which I'm pretty sure is stock Windows, and is fairly narrow-ish. For dimensions we set the Calibri font to 0.8 width and suppress spaces. Some of our other tags and labels also have the Calibri font set to 0.8.