As far as I can tell, text within Inventor is an exact representation of what is in the actual font file. While I do have an appreciation for things being exactly what they are, this creates inconsistencies in drawing appearance between other platforms. In short, the layer style for a text object in Inventor can control its color in the drawing environment, but the line weight parameter has no effect. This was confirmed by Autodesk support.
Scenario:
- You have a multi-discipline project.
- You have some drawings being developed in Inventor and some in AutoCAD.
- Your client's CAD standard is fairly rigid; standardizing on font, layers, line weights/types, dimensions, etc..
- Drawings developed and plotted per the standard in AutoCAD have significantly heavier text given the line weight established by the layer standard.
- Comparatively, drawings in Inventor have noticeably lighter text; even after the use of fonts like Simplex_IV25, Simplex_IV50, and setting the text to bold (which affects the width factor).
I found two temporary, but time-consuming solutions to this problem...
1. Develop an all new font file that matches the line weight. Doing this created several new issues like the effect it had on text height, width, spacing, and justification. I'm not a font creation expert so the one I made is far from perfect. Regardless, this method required a lot of trial, error, and time, and documented procedure for other users.
2. Export to AutoCAD every time you plot.
As a solution, I would like to see Inventor treat text similar to how it treats geometry, with regards to, line weight. Ideally, this would be controlled through the layers. However, support for this function via the text editing dialog box would be a start.
