Explode Text - Problem

[Anonymous]

What does the error "Could not retrieve the profiles of the selected text" mean while trying to explode text so I can engrave it?  Does not happen with all fonts.  Is there some way to predict which will work, and whick won't?  My work requires the Hypatia Sans Pro font and I can't use it in Fusion 360.

[roambotics_scott]

I haven’t tried in years but the only thing I found that worked semi-reliably was to generate the text in Illustrator, convert it to an outline, export as SVG, import that into F350, and extrude / draft that - and even then I had to tediously manually clean up the faces

[RonSargeant]

Five years on and it's still not fixed. Autodesk now want us to think this is worth $60 a month. I've just paid for a font only to find it doesn't work in Explode.  What a joke.

[MichaelT_123]

Hi Mr RonSargeant,

Consider looking at the thread 

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/explode-text/m-p/9749927#M228049

It might help you to relive the frustration.

Additionally, it would be reasonable to state that the font methods have been developed over many years, and they are legacy resources in many OSs. Years back, they were tightly protected by patents, licencing agreements, embedded security bits, etc. Echoes of these "wars" are still with us. 

The most important one (in my opinion) is the way how individual glyphs (a graphical representation of characters) are expressed (programmed). There are many such methods developed over decades and sprinkled over the variety of fonts we see. Many can be compared to fossilized dinosaur poo, covered by layers of software sediments. One has to be a courageous person to touch it. In other words, it would be a cost-prohibitive exercise to embed such archaic methods in 60 $/month software.

Currently, there are two main ways to code glyphs: Microsoft's and Adobe's, and yes, they are presented in standard wrappers called TrueType, or OpenType. In most cases, F360 deals with Microsoft way coded fonts reasonably well as it can rely on operating system resources/modules. It does not cost too much. Adobe's PostScript renderer, which can generate better quality code (glyphs) is not the part of OS (or some usage protective measures are attached). Software, which has had an association with Adobe/PostScript is the way to utilize such type of fonts. Someone mentioned Illustrator. By the way, how much it costs?

So, Mr RonSargeant, don't wait until the enemy surrenders in a face to face battle. Maybe a change of the tactics as suggested by others could bring faster results?

Regards

MichaelT

[RonSargeant]

Michael, thanks for your input. I don't believe all of the legacy issues around fonts is relevant. The glyph can be rendered to the screen in any program, at the end of the process it is just bits in a bit plane regardless of the complexities of the engine that produced it. It is obviously a problem that can be overcome because I can do this very easily in V-Carve pro, generating a vector map of the text works beautifully.  V-Carve Pro is a much less featured application, but it is focused on the jobs that matter. I don't need simulation, or sheet metal bending or electronics or generative design, etc. Fusion 360 went in the wrong direction when it started to get too many additional features. The audience for all of these features dwindles exponentially as they are added, opposed to Autodesk's view that more features means more customers.
On the other hand, F360 text support is just "adequate" and and has always been so. It doesn't even give you the option to keep text settings, every time I need something other than default I have to redo the size, font, etc. That's bad UX man. And if the option to have persistent settings is there, it's hidden, more bad design.

Plus, if you use the SVG workaround, this is also very basic and tied into a sketch with few options to further manipulate it.

I stand by my statement that this software isn't worth a hefty subscription when some core elements that have been there all along are very lacklustre, never mind functions like Explode. 

[Anonymous]

what alternate illustrator you used. 

[Anonymous]

not able to expand the fond " kruti dev 60". 

[g-andresen]

Hi,

1. fusion prefers OTF fonts
2. create the text e.g. in Inkscape and import it as SVG in Fusion and everything works

günther

[AussieMatt]

2021 - 6 years later, how did they go with looking into the text, I am still having a tone of issues and it seems like they didn't improve much in that time with fonts and text in general, I cant even type two sized text into same box or do most CAD operations with text, it really needs some updating please! The work arounds are horrendous, I am coming into Fusion during 2020 and I feel like a lot of these old bug threads have not been addressed, where can we all go to get better results? I would really like to stay with Fusion over Solidworks, but basics of sketching in Fusion seem to need a lot of attention, Considering derived from same company as Autocad its really strange a lot of sketch basics are not addressed yet. 

[roambotics_scott]

They literally just DGAF at least not in any way that will ever converge.

We gave up on F350 years ago and recently tried using it again to save money on Solidworks licenses.

The damned thing still crashes constantly. It’s just a joke.

Even as a free program, that’s just unreasonable for something as old as F350 is, and it’s ridiculous that they actually take money from some people for this thing.

[parkerledwards]

7 years later and this function is still garbage. To be an expert in fusion is to be an expert in workarounds using software made by other developers. 

[Katie_Belmont]

It's been 8 years and I'm having the exact same problem. So I guess this is just never going to be a working feature. 🙈

[roambotics_scott]

It’s so annoying 

This is and always has been so close to an amazing product but there are so many things like this they never address that just make it unusable past a certain point 

we ended up switching to SolidWorks and it’s so annoying to be stuck with PCs because of it but we obviously made the right calk

[MichaelT_123]

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/installed-font-not-showing-in-fusion/m-p/1...

[anthony.fuentes6ANWB]

2024 and same issue... smh. 

[roambotics_scott]

This kind of thing is exactly why I gave up on F350

It's frustrating because it is so close to being amazing. I have friends who never used CAD before who picked this up and within an hour had some nice 3D models of cool chairs and if you watch their evangelists do a 20 minute demo it seems like magic but then if you actually try to use it seriously you quickly find that almost all development seems to be guided by「 lets add a cool demisable feature bullet point to our marketing material ! 」without ever fully fleshing anything out and because of that everything is mind-blowing.. if you stay on the rails, but it quickly becomes apparent that it is just a minefield of surprise gotchas and bugs and incomplete features like this that make actually using it an exercise in punching yourself in the face over and over again.

[justinpoulsen]

Reposting in 2024 because they never got around to fixing this lol

[HughesTooling]

There's a thread here talking about the text command Sketch.TextWritingSystem /any that might help with fonts that don't show in the list. Not tried it as not something I need.

[davepetrides]

Guys!  It's finally fixed!!!

Just kidding.  It's 2025, almost a decade after this bug was posted, and they haven't fixed anything at all.  Super cool!

[roambotics_scott]

This is exactly why I stopped using F350

It was always amazing from the time it was in Autodesk's labs but they continually added new「 whiz-bang 」stuff that was ≈ 90-95% done so they could send evangelists out to demo it only to move on to the next marketing pop and forget about all the rough edges on all the half-baked stuff

I'm sure this issue is deceptively difficult and probably highly non-trivial to solve but so are all the other new things they've kept adding and after a decade I'm confident they easily could have solved this if they wanted to which makes it impossible for me to interpret as anything but volitional especially given that this is a fairly big / useful core-feature not some corner case of a corner case