SHX vs TTF - opinions?

[owen66]

hey everyone, just curious to hear what people use and why (pros/cons)

i've only ever used SHX fonts but i just realized a while ago that TTF fonts are searchable when you make a PDF and they also end up being CTB agnostic (as they're not lines, which should have been a "duh" for me but it never crossed my mind).

anyway, i'm thinking of switching everything over to something like the Arial family - ubiquitous and simple.

what would i be giving up if i moved away from shape files?

[rkmcswain]

Personally, I like SHX for speed and graphical appearance in the editor. (Have you tried snapping to the INSPT of a TT font text/mtext object?)

Searching in output PDF files have never really been a concern for us, although 2016 allows SHX to be searchable now (with a "gotcha")...

REF: http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Drawing...

[pendean]

Just as many users have switched to TTF as are those that stick with SHX. Pick one and be consistent is the best approach for whichever you decide.

[Kent1Cooper]

Some considerations that come to mind:

.SHX fonts are much faster than .TTF in opening or regenerating a drawing with a lot of text in it [try the difference with a whole sheet full of spec notes or something].

With an .SHX font, and color-based lineweights in plotting, you have infinite control over the weight of Mtext content or portions thereof, where you can assign colors to all or any portion(s) of the content.  In .TTF fonts, you have regular and bold, and that's all, but with .SHX you can give a slightly heavier lineweight to one word, an even heavier weight to another phrase ... as many weights as you have available in your plot configuration.

With .TTF fonts, you can make portions of Mtext italic, and/or bold just by picking the Bold button, but not with .SHX fonts, where you can do bold only by way of color as above, but can't do italics at all.

At any larger size, .TTF fonts look much better, but at smaller sizes (typical notes, dimension text, etc.), the "look" difference isn't nearly as evident.

[rkmcswain]

Thank you @Kent1Cooper - I totally forgot to mention the part about the lineweights of SHX and the lack of this with TTF.

That is actually my biggest complaint about TTF.

[jggerth]

or biggest advantage --- when you have a linetype that includes text, ( --------------SS-------------- ) and you want the line heavy, and the text ro remain readable.

Still issues AFAIK with TTF fonts looking fuzzy if the Z of the text is not _eactly_ 0.00000000to-how-ever-many-places

more characters and font choices with TTF, but not neccessarily the one's you'll need.

[dgorsman]

Good news/bad news:  GN, *many* different TTF fonts available; BN, TTF fonts must be installed on individual computers (at least, those which don't come with Windows) while SHX fonts can live in a common network folder.

I still come down in favor of TTF though, especially for 11x17/A3 or smaller drawing sizes.

[owen66]

thanks everyone, some great comment here.

I'm thinking i might make the switch to TTF. our use cases seem to fall within the realm of "not affected" so i think it will be ok.

thanks again - i always appreciate hearing what others are doing 🙂

[StephenThomasGrace]

One other thing to take note of is the actual plotted height of the text.

For any font at a particular height, the shx font will always be larger than a ttf (unless you use a zero pen width).

For example:

2.5mm high romans.shx with a 0.3mm pen will plot exactly 2.8mm high as light grey line shows in comparison to the Arial TrueType.

 

Also note that the ttf is exactly on the baseline where the shx overlaps by half the pen width.

Just something to consider when developing standards!

-steve