shx vs ttf

[Anonymous]

I've never really understood the reasons behind choosing between shx and
ttf fonts. It always looked to me that the shx fonts were more of a
creation solely due to pen plotters where a filled font was slower to
plot. But since the shx fonts are still out there and the pen plotters
aren't, is this because of some other advantage or is it just a case of
supporting legacy drawings?

[Anonymous]

It's a choice: shx are built into AutoCAD and are there or many reasons,
including the fact that for most users AutoCAD just behaves
better/quicker/smaller plot files etc.

--
Dean Saadallah
http://LTisACAD.blogspot.com
Add-on products for LT
http://www.pendean.com/lt
--

[kevinpchandler]

Yes, shx fonts are legacy.
But as to which to use depends on the font face you wish to portray yourself with.

Keep in mind:
shx fonts, being pen plotter vintage, don't proportion as well as ttf fonts. The bigger they get, the thinner they look.
Some shx fonts countered this by having additional lines for some of the characters' definitions, like architxt.shx, to "fatten" themselves up.
But this can bite you on the smaller text sizes, since the additional lines are closer together at the same pen line width.

If you're OLEing in Word or Excel, do you want the remainder of your plot to match in appearance? If so, it's ttf.
Same is true if you're data linking to Excel in LT tables since the font used is from the spreadsheet and not the font set in the table style.

Dean is correct on performance, especially for some ttf files.
The ttf "CountryBlueprint", a for legacy architectural "handwritten" font, has pathetic performance.
Other ttf's, like Arial, work just fine.

[jalneal]

Very interesting - I always thought that TTF fonts were slower than shx fonts when loading, but that no longer appears to be the case.  I have a file with about 500 cross sections and extensive labeling.  When I regen with Arial.TTF it takes about 35 seconds, and with simplex.SHX it takes about 43 seconds.  It appears that the performance issues have indeed changed over time.