mtext bullet showing up as "S"

[mermerCAD]

Hi-

I'm posting this in both regular AutoCAD and C3D since it's seems like a regular AutoCAD problem, but we use C3D.  Since we switched to 2014, when we try to do bullets in mtext in any textstyle, the bullets are the letter "S".  Does anyone know what would have caused this and/or how I can fix it?

Thanks so much for your help!

Meredith

C3D 2014

Windows 7 64 bit

[dmfrazier]

Could you post a sample DWG and an image (screenshot) of what you see on your system?

[3wood]

What is the character of previous "S" if the Mtext is exploded?

[mermerCAD]

Attached is a dwg with the S bullets and an image of it on my screen.

When I explode the MTEXT, the "S" is replaced by "?"

Thanks for all of your help!

Meredith

[justshutup]

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@mermerCAD wrote:

Attached is a dwg with the S bullets and an image of it on my screen.

When I explode the MTEXT, the "S" is replaced by "?"

Thanks for all of your help!

Meredith

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I opened your dwg, accepted the default font substitution (romans) and it looks fine.  I wonder if your font is hosed...

[mermerCAD]

It does it for all of our textstyles.  Crap!  How do I fix that?  Sorry to sound like I'm clueless, but I am when it comes to fonts!

Meredith

[justshutup]

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@mermerCAD wrote:

It does it for all of our textstyles.  Crap!  How do I fix that?  Sorry to sound like I'm clueless, but I am when it comes to fonts!

Meredith

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Try picking a totally different font for your textstyle. Or make another textstyle of your own (with a font not normally used) to see if it is the font itself.

[mermerCAD]

I tried a bunch of different fonts and created new textstyles with different fonts, and I still get S.  That **** S!  I changed my support paths to get the out of the box fonts from the C drive instead of our network, and I still get S.

Meredith

[dmfrazier]

"I changed my support paths to get the out of the box fonts from the C drive instead of our network..."

When you do this, be sure to place the path as high up in the order as possible, just in case there are somehow competing fonts in a higher folder

Also, be sure to shut-down and re-launch AutoCAD after any change.

[dmfrazier · Accepted solution]

I think this is a Windows font issue, not an AutoCAD SHX font issue.

Look in your Windows fonts (go to Start, Control Panel, Fonts) to see if you have a font named "Symbol" (or Symbol Regular") loaded. (This is the font name that shows up in the formatting gibberish when you look at the Properties of the MText, as shown in the image below.)

[mermerCAD]

That was kind of it!  It's not a Windows font.  We have a shape font called symbol that is used when surveyors convert from Terramodel.  It's really weird.  Trees are the letter P.  Signs are B.  Bizarre.

Somehow this must have been working in reverse.  When I removed the symbol.shx and .shp files and removed it from the .fmp file, the mtext bullets worked fine.

Our surveyors have switched to C3D now, but we still have old drawings originating from Terramodel that use that shape font.  So now I just need to figure out how I can keep the symbol font without it messing up our mtext bullets. 

Thanks so much for all of your help!

Meredith

[dmfrazier]

"Somehow this must have been working in reverse.  When I removed the symbol.shx and .shp files and removed it from the .fmp file, the mtext bullets worked fine."

That's because under those circumstances AutoCAD finds and uses the Windows font (the only one it can find) to produce the bullet correctly.

"So now I just need to figure out how I can keep the symbol font without it messing up our mtext bullets."

With the Windows font (which is "always" available to all Windows users), why do you need to "keep" the AutoCAD one? It seems to me that you are better off getting rid of it.