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]

The font renderer is pretty flaky.. my workaround was to create the text in Illustrator, convert it to an outline, export as SVG, and then import (and inevitebly clean up) that.

[Anonymous]

That's what I ended up doing, but I don't have Illustrator so I located an alternative, installed it, learned how to use it, created my text, exported it, imported it into Fusion about a dozen times trying to get the scale right, cleand up the sketch, and just like that I had my text extrude.

In Solidworks I start a sketch, type some text, click extrude. No need to even explode the text, nevermind jump through a bunch of hoops.

[roambotics_scott]

Tell me about it. Awful, forces a horrible kludge, and it seems pretty fixable.

[Anonymous]

What does Autodesk have to say? Anything at all?

[roambotics_scott]

They'll think about it.. eventually

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-request-a/improved-font-rendering/idc-p/5809664...

[colin.smith]

Hi @Anonymous

Is that font that you are using a True Type font?

Colin

[Anonymous]

@colin.smith, Yes.  It is an Adobe True-Type font, HypatiaSansPro-Regular.TTF

[colin.smith]

@Anonymous, my understanding is that we should work with True Type fonts, so this sounds like a bug.  

Let me take a look in to it and I'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Colin

[Anonymous]

If it is any clue, I am trialing Inventor HSM becasue I am having too many prolbems with Fusion.  In Inventor (2016) this font doesn't even show up.  Does that mean there is something special about it?  Maybe that helps?

[colin.smith]

Hi @Anonymous, thanks for the additional information, I've got the dev team looking in to this and I will get back to you when I have some more data to share.

Thanks

Colin

[colin.smith]

Hi @Anonymous

I downloaded the hypatia sans pro font in both .ttf and .otf and neither of the two would show the profile edges.

I get the following result:

I have forwarded this font to the dev team to assess if this is a problem with this particular font, or something deeper.

The work-around in the meantime is to export the needed text from a package like Illustrator as SVG and import it in to Fusion.

[roambotics_scott]

That reminds me @colin.smith - when you fix that, it'd be really awesome if you could also add the ability to control kerning and to have text be centered and autoscale to fill some user specified width or height.

[Anonymous]

@colin.smith

Ok, thanks for confirming.  Please keep me up to date when you hear something back.

[colin.smith]

Hi @roambotics_scott

Text in general needs some serious attention. Likely those items you mentioned won't get tackled at the same time as the font issue.

I believe I have seen some of your posts in the idea station on the subject, but if you haven't posted this I would suggest you post it there and I will move it over to the Future Consideration bucket so that I have it when we take a serious look at the text functionality.

Thanks

Colin

[roambotics_scott]

Understood and thanks, @colin.smith. I had a couple that got archived but will repost.

[PhilProcarioJr]

The whole text and svg extrusion thing has been bugging me. I do this kind of work all the time and needed a reliable way to do it over and over so I started testing different methods out. I found a way to get any font or SVG file to reliably work in Fusion 360. I downloaded the font you are having trouble with and did a test. It was fast and very easy, and best of all you never need to do any cleanup on the geometry. Its lightweight so it doesn't slow fusion down. There is no need to explode the text or any extra steps. Sadly I can't write up how I did it until later tonight or tomorrow. I will try to make a few tutorials as soon as I get time. 

[Anonymous]

@PhilProcarioJr, thank you in advance for your help.  I look forward to learning what your steps are.

[PhilProcarioJr]

Here is another example, no cleanup just filleted the edges. I have tested 85 different fonts all turned out this clean and worked without issue.

I should add that the entire process from start to finish was about 5 min. That included making the svg file from scratch.

[PhilProcarioJr]

I should also add that because I found a "WORK AROUND" it doesn't mean Autodesk doesn't need to refine and fix the text tools, because they definitely do need to work on it.

I should also add that SolidWorks also chokes on a lot of different fonts too and this method works in that app as well. 

The two biggest benefits to this method is simple clean geometry that doesn't need cleanup and doesn't bring both Fusion 360 or SolidWorks to an unusable crawl state.