Aloha Maxim,
Thank you for your work-around. Here is my experience, following your suggestions, in AutoCAD for Mac 2013. It may prove useful for others. Having Adobe Illustrator CS6, I used it to generate all the letters in one particular font. Inside AI, I selected the text, and used the menu command
Type
Create Outlines
Then I Exported the file as an AutoCAD Drawing (.dwg) and opened it with AutoCAD for Mac 2013.
In AC, I selected all the letters at once, and used the Explode command. From that point onward, unfortunately, all commands I used could only be used on one letter at a time, or one piece of a letter at a time.
That initial Explode converted the letters into Hatch objects. Getting from a Hatch object to something that could be extruded was a bit of a pain, but here is what finally worked for me. If there is an easier way, I expect Maxim will elect to expound on that!
Select one of the Hatch objects. When you select a Hatch object, a button bar appears at the top center of the screen.
Click on Select Boundary.
Bring the cursor down off of that button bar, into the drawing area.
Enter
Enter. After the 2nd Enter, a dropdown box magically appears.
Select Dissociate (which is another name for a kind of Explode)
Hit the Delete key (I have a "dasKeyboard"; I suppose a Backspace key on an original Mac keyboard would work equivalently here.
The result of doing all that is that you end up with either a 2D Polyline (if the letter had no curves, like a simple 'E'), or a Spline (if there were curves).
BEWARE OF SPLINES !!!
I ran into LOTS of problems with extrusions where the splines were concerned. I note above that Maxim avoided splines because they are slow. For the simple font I was using, extruding the splines was fast, but as I said, there were other problems. Some refused to extrude. Some of the Solids created by their extrusions were faulty, so created unexpected artifacts (that didn't show up until I did a format conversion via MeshLab). Some could not be used in a Subtract command (as when you subtract the center of an 'O' from the body of that letter). The cure is simple... convert the Splines to Polylines. Unfortunately, this cannot be done in bulk. It has to be done one spline at a time.
Modify
Object
Polyline
is the command you want. It prompts you to select an object. If you've selected a Spline object, when you click on Polyline, it asks Do you want to convert it to a polyline, and you accept the default 'y'. Then it asks for a fineness, and I gave it 10. Finally, it gives you several options for the conversion. I used Fit and it worked fine for me.
Now you have a Polyline that should be able to be extruded with no difficulty.
Good luck and learn to embrace the tedium!
