topic Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read! in FlexSim Forum

17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

stan_e_davis — Wed, 24 May 2017 17:54:35 GMT

I first sent an email to support, but received the canned response.

You guys changed the font on the 2017 Update 1 manual. It is very hard to read. Can you re-issue it with an easier-to-read sans serif font like before? Thanks.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

matt_long — Wed, 24 May 2017 20:43:29 GMT

The user manual font hasn't been changed. The font is set to the Helvetica Font Family, which is Helvetica and Arial, both san-serif fonts. What does your user manual look like?

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

Matthew_Gillespie — Wed, 24 May 2017 20:44:59 GMT

He's talking about the PDF file you can download

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

stan_e_davis — Wed, 24 May 2017 20:56:40 GMT

For the PDF I downloaded today (5/24/17), Helvetica has been replaced with Courier.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

stan_e_davis — Wed, 24 May 2017 21:03:08 GMT

Here is a pic of the difference...

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

Ben_WilsonADSK — Wed, 24 May 2017 21:06:59 GMT

I don't know why the dev team has chosen to publish the .pdf user manually differently for the latest version. Perhaps they will chime in.

Serif vs Sans Serif is largely a matter of taste or preference. Designers will choose one or the other based on their goals. Perhaps another user requested serifs for their printed manuals, and this is another case of "you can't please all the people all the time."

The in-software manual remains sans:

In the latest versions of Microsoft Word, you can open PDF files, at which point you can change the font to whatever you like best. I've just tested this on the 17.1.0 user manual, and globally changed the font to Arial, with the result attached here:

flexsim-1710-manual-arial.pdf

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

Ben_WilsonADSK — Wed, 24 May 2017 21:11:23 GMT

It is actually Times New Roman, according to Microsoft Word upon opening the PDF.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

stan_e_davis — Wed, 24 May 2017 21:56:26 GMT

Putting the 'you can't please all the people' comment to the side, I was just bringing it up that the fact the font has changed from what we have seen through the years and is presently harder to read. You guys want customer feedback, right? Yes, you can open the pdf in Word, but the conversion is not perfect.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

Ben_WilsonADSK — Wed, 24 May 2017 22:28:05 GMT

We do want and value your feedback, @Stan Davis. If the change was an oversight or a whim, then I'm sure this can be changed back based on your feedback. If the change was due to other feedback I'm not aware of, the dev team will certainly take yours into consideration, in addition to whatever prompted the change in the first place.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

Ben_WilsonADSK — Wed, 24 May 2017 22:46:31 GMT

@Stan Davis,

Looks like the font change was a result of a technical problem in the automatic build.

We're doing a manual build now to see if we can fix the problem and will post an update to this Answer when it completes.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

matt_long — Wed, 24 May 2017 22:56:17 GMT

It looks like Microsoft Word 2016 can't correctly export an HTML file to PDF. I've uploaded the corrected PDF manual to the downloads section of the FlexSim website. You can access it here:

FlexSim Downloads

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

stan_e_davis — Thu, 25 May 2017 13:15:10 GMT

I appreciate the effort with this. However, the corrected manual has missing images throughout the entire manual. I downloaded it twice to verify the issue. Pages 53, 56, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71, ...1584.

Here is a pic comparing the initial manual with the revised manual...

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

matt_long — Thu, 25 May 2017 20:10:57 GMT

Thanks for pointing that out. I've uploaded a new version to the FlexSim website and I've confirmed that those images are there.

Re: 17 Update 1 Manual Font Hard To Read!

stan_e_davis — Thu, 25 May 2017 21:00:42 GMT

Thanks for the support, Matt. We're good to go.