French special characters not appearing correctly

[Anonymous]

Hi. I am working on a drawing that has some French language text. This is not something I have experience in. So I'm having some problems with some of the characters that are not in English, like with accents. I will enter the correct character, and it will seem fine. But when I go back, the character will be messed up, there will be an odd line or something in its place. If I reopen the text editor and hit OK it goes back to normal. But then when I go back it's changed again.

The two characters I'm having this problem with are É and Ô. So, for example, in the image below, the word should be "Arrêt." And you can see that's what's in the editor. But instead of the 'É' there is an odd shape.

Again, let me emphasize that the characters are entered correctly in the text editor, and appear OK in the drawing at first. But when I go to another part of the drawing and go back again they will be messed up again.

So far I haven't found anyone else who has had this problem. Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks in advance. 

[patrick.emin]

Hi, could you tell us what font is used? SHX or TTF?

[Anonymous]

SHX.

[pendean]

Use a TTF: your SHX file may not actually contain the characters you need. Most do not.

[Anonymous]

This is from a line of products that has used the same font for years if not decades. I don't think I can change it. Worse comes to worse I can manually draw them. 

If they are just not in the font family, why does the correct character appear only later to appear scrambled? In the image below, the word "Étient" should appear twice, once on the left and once on the right. I took this screenshot just after "fixing" the one on the left, so that you can see it appears correct momentarily. The one on the right has not been "fixed" recently so it appears incorrect. If I go back to the corrected one in a few minutes it will have changed to the incorrect form.

The font in question is ugtxt.shx, btw.

[pendean]

Are you using the letter correct code for the SHX?
Is the active text STYLE command actually set to use this font?

Sorry, but your pictures alone don't tell us much. If you can, post your DWG and your font file and explain what the codes are to get those special characters and we can try and help you out a bit.

[Anonymous]

Hi. I can't post the full file (proprietary info) but I saved some of the text to another file so you can see what's happening.

I'm not sure what you mean by the letter code for the SHX - are you referring to the code you use to input the special characters? If so I used the codes here: http://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/languages/psu/french/