Adding Fonts to Mac installed Fusion 360

[OFGLLC]

I have two Macbooks that run Fusion well but I have been unsuccessful at adding fonts, specifically stencil fonts.  I have a PC that adds fonts fine. On one Macbook, a stencil font is already on it (perhaps from Office for Mac) that works fine in the Fusion installed on it.  I even moved that exact font from the working installation Mac to the other Mac and while available, it just displays as red boxes in the Text Command.  This is what happens when attempting to add downloaded fonts to either Mac.  Attempting to open sketches from the PC or working Mac (with the one stencil font) results in a red box around each character.

[Phil.E]

I have found some more information about it.

For mac, the Fusion modeling engine (separate from the drawing text manager) is looking for fonts in the following locations:

/Library/Fonts

/System/Library/Fonts

/Library/Fonts/Microsoft

I suspect that FontBook may be installing the fonts into another location. Can you confirm?

We are still investigating this, so don't give up hope. It looks like a path issue now. I think the modeling concerns about crashing and blocked fonts is no longer valid, from earlier in this post. Surely if Windows can use them for modeling, so can Mac, so long as Fusion finds them in the paths above. So for now, please try installing to these locations and let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

[OFGLLC · Accepted solution]

Thanks a lot Phil. No, really thanks a lot!

As I mentioned earlier, Fusion lists the font in the listbox after a Fusion re-start.  Just wouldn't work with it.

I have never found where these fonts go.  They don't come up on a file search.  In FontBook, they appear in the user folder and all fonts folder.

Of the three paths you provided, the file was not in either of the first two and the third does not exist.  There is no MS Office on this particular Mac in my shop.

I copied the font from the download folder into Library->Fonts.

Success.

So, to reiterate, I installed from Downloads in Font Book, then copied same file from downloads to Library->Fonts.   Fusion must be re-started.

I have a couple of other very serious problems but they are difficult to describe and because there is a randomness about them, I am attempting to document and provide a repeatable example.  I will make a new post when I get there.  I fight these two issues every day,  Then there are the CAM side issu.......

 I'm going to mark it as a solution but it is really a work-around since other Apps don't require this step.

Jeff

[Phil.E]

Well, another bit of inside baseball here: Fusion has multiple ways to recognize fonts. The modeling engine is separate from the other. So.... you see the font with one, but it doesn't work with the other. 😞

This update is because we finally figured it out. We want to fix the problem for good. Thanks to you all for your patience. It doesn't hurt to ping us on these things at all.

For your post: looking forward to it. 🙂

Thanks,

[donzapple]

Thought I'd bump this conversation - Fusion 360 still does not allow text creation when sketching.

OSX 10.12.1

Fusion 2.0.2604

Unmodified file system - /System/Library/Fonts   /Library/Fonts   and ~/Library/Fonts are all correct and untampered with.

This bug is a recent effect. Previously, most fonts would render correctly, now no fonts appear to be usable.

 

[Phil.E]

@donzapple

Sorry to hear that.

I'm not seeing any such error. Fusion does allow text creation while sketching. So it might just be you. If anyone else is having this trouble please chime in.

Did you try restarting your computer?

At this time I don't think this is a bug, so I need to ask product support to handle this further.

Thanks,

[OFGLLC]

I think perhaps you may be confused about the topic. Maybe you were looking at another thread. I have never had the problem you describe in any version.
My thread is about installing fonts and having them not be expandable, mainly. I offered up a work around for that.
I have always been able to create text in a Sketch on my Macs.

[donzapple]

Sure - the problem may be unrelated to yours, so perhaps it is best that I start another thread.

[OFGLLC]

What are you talking about? Have you looked at the Sketch menu? It’s next to the big A.

[Phil.E]

@OFGLLC

In the image attached to donzapple's post the font Arial is not recognized by Fusion. So he knows how to do it, but something is broken on his machine.

My suspicion is the fonts folder has been moved or somehow altered. It may well be possible Fusion could be improved to handle whatever donzapple is experiencing, however at this time it looks like a problem originating from outside Fusion. Hopefully we get some word on the resolution of this.

[OFGLLC]

You are still not reading the thread.  There is a bug with Fusion.  I explained it thoroughly and based upon Autodesk suggestions, described the work around.  That however, is not the issue the last poster companied about and has now acknowledged does not fit the thread.  Be better if you just didn't say anything more in this thread.

[jmunkki5ZDPV]

I found a nice free TrueType font called Stencilia and installed it on my Mac. It shows up in the sketch font menu after restarting the application, but results in very plain looking text in some default font. I used Autodesk Graphic, broke up the text into outlines and exported as SVG. Importing the SVG worked. The import wasn't smart enough to zoom out to show the full SVG, so it for a while I thought it wasn't working (the SVG wasn't anywhere near the coordinate origin).

It's an ugly work-around that makes it very difficult to edit the text, but it got the job done. Maybe you could coordinate with the Autodesk Graphic team and obtain their text to SVG outline conversion code and use that to render the text in Fusion360?

[OFGLLC]

jmunkki5ZDPV,

The App simply does not copy the font to the correct folder.  The work around it to do it manually.  I have installed dozens of fonts since that.  This is noted above in the solution post.  I don't know if it was fixed or not in recent updates because I haven't needed to install new font in a while, but the work around is simple.

[jmunkki5ZDPV]

I must have read through your post too quickly... Moving the TTF files to Library/Fonts worked for me too.

Font Book on the Mac had installed the font files in ~/Library/Fonts, but for F360 to work, they need to be in /Library/Fonts.

[EdSinNC]

Phil,

Digging this up from the dead but I found something that may help you and other folks.  Font Book has an option in the preferences menu to select the storage location for new fonts.  The options are "User" or "Computer".  Neither is very specific and you can't navigate beyond those options, but by changing the default to "computer", the font file installs into the System/Library/Fonts folder you identified.  Once installed there, it worked perfectly in Fusion.   

In the picture below, I have already changed the storage location but I left the font in the previous "User" location in the background for reference.  Once you delete the font in the User section, you can re-install it using the "Computer" location.

I couldn't attach a copy of the Glasten-Bold.tff but if you search the web for it there are a dozen or so options on where you can download it from online.  

Couple of notes that may explain some previous confusion:

If the font was installed in the USER folder Fusion seemed to be able to detect the font name in the text tool dropdown but then just used some kind of default text in its place in a sketch.  However, once the storage location was fixed, any sketches made using the new fonts name selected in the dropdown were updated to the actual (correct) font even though they were originally displayed as something else.  This could create some weird down stream issues if you did anything with the default font but I didn't invest any time in testing how not to make it work.

[OFGLLC]

I should have been more specific, when I just noted a manual install works fine.  However, thanks for the font reference.  I will look at that one.

[itsmepokono]

This is a bug in fusion in macos that should be addressed. The solution works but it's not acceptable.

[StephenCim-001]

For 2 years I've been switching to Windows to use fonts that did not work in OSX F360   🙂

Moved them to the system font folder, they now work 🙂

[timpreston]

The font Im trying to install appears greyed out in the font list. Have tried shifting it from "user" to "Computer", directly installing it in the fonts Library, verifying in font book and restarted everything several times to no avail.

The font I bought is OLF stencil — a single line font that has been stencilised. I need a font for quick and simple laser cutting parts labels but one where the middle of the letter doesn't drop out. Are there any .shx fonts that are stencilised?

[OFGLLC]

Yah, well, maybe doesn't have the metadata for expanding.  If you are writing the Gettysburg Address, not sure what to do but it you are just doing some labels with a few words or something, there are two other ways to skin the cat.  The little places in the font that allow it to not cut out enclosed areas are called tabs.   1) Just make you own tabs by deleting a small part of the the lines enclosing space.    So, basically you write the text as though you are engraving and then add tabs.   or ... 2)  CAD software for Laser-Plasma typically make it very easy to places tabs, especially when nesting a lot of small parts so they don't create flags as they are being cut, effectively doing what you could do manually in CAD in 1) above.

I hope that is helpful but I imagine it won't be.