Fancy Fonts and Sharing

The company I work for specializes in consulting engineering, which means we work with a large number of architects that all have their own styles and drafting requirements. It also means they all have their own logos which usually include some font I have never thought of loading until the first day I got a title block from them. That’s life. I will contact the architect if I need the font, install it for the design team and go on.

Now recently my company updated our Logos, and sure enough we used some font, I never heard of. Now the shoe was on the other foot. I started getting calls requesting the new font. After a few calls, I suspected there must be a better way. Here’s what I did.

I used a really cool Express tool called “Explode Text”. If you have Express tools loaded just type “txtexp” on the command line.



Here is a before and after of a demonstration logo.


The text exploding process will leave closed polylines behind that define the shape of the text that was there before. Now, use the hatch command to fill in the polylines, and then delete the polylines to keep things clean.

The result is the logo will look the same as it ever did but you will no longer get requests for the original font. This works for me because I don’t use any “fancy” fonts for my title blocks text or for drawing text. If you do, the best solution I think is to eTransmit all drawings and include fonts.

Speaking of eTransmit, I make a few standard setups 2000, 2004 and 2007. This way, I can select what version to export out to on the fly.

This works great, but you have to set it up for users individually because this information is stored in the Registry. If you are confident enough to mess with registry’s (In this case, I have not tried it), Use the Find tool and search for “etrans” It will take you right to the registry location where the eTransmittal information is located. Some folks can and do push information into the registry on install or during upgrades.