Topic: SHX-text as Text to PDF?

[cmwade77]

Just be aware that if you xref a file with a lot of TTF text, the resulting drawing will become EXTREMELY slow to open. We have had some take as much as an hour to open due to the number of xrefs that had TTF fonts in them, we changed them to SHX in all of the xRefs and the same file opened in under a minute.

I'm not noticing this...  Maybe you could define "lot of TTF text"   

Is it possible it was applying font mapping or alternate font substitution for TTF fonts not installed?

I would say about 5,000 individual pieces of text per drawing, with about 50 different text styles. With approximately 15 drawings (all with this) xrefed into our drawing. So this results in about 50,000 individual pieces of text with about 500 text styles referenced into one drawing.

The drawings were not created by us, we simply have to use them as our backgrounds.

This was definitely the cause of the problems, because all w did to fix the open times was change everything to SHX fonts and it disappeared. Now, it could be some combination of being a TTF and have text rotated or width factors defined, etc. but changing to SHX fixed the problem.

We only made the switch because AutoDesk told us that this was the problem that was causing the slow down and sure enough, they were right.

[danallen]

OK 50,000 texts is nuts. But was it really the drawing open, or the drawing regen? You might test by turning on QTEXTMODE. I totally get regens being crazy with TTF, just not understanding why drawing open would be a problem.

[cmwade77]

OK 50,000 texts is nuts. But was it really the drawing open, or the drawing regen? You might test by turning on QTEXTMODE. I totally get regens being crazy with TTF, just not understanding why drawing open would be a problem.

Not positive, but honestly, at this point, changing them to SHX fixed the problem, so I am going to leave it be.

[danallen]

oh I agree, no argument with your solution. My only thought is that for "normal" projects without 50K+ texts, TTFs work just fine and have benefit of searchability. Adding OCR processing to our workflow is possible but not desirable to use SHX. I really with our consultants would use TTF, so that I can search their drawings, and copy/paste their notes as required.

[cmwade77]

oh I agree, no argument with your solution. My only thought is that for "normal" projects without 50K+ texts, TTFs work just fine and have benefit of searchability. Adding OCR processing to our workflow is possible but not desirable to use SHX. I really with our consultants would use TTF, so that I can search their drawings, and copy/paste their notes as required.

Interesting, no one has ever wanted to copy our notes, simply because they pertain specifically to our disciplines.

[danallen]

Interesting, no one has ever wanted to copy our notes, simply because they pertain specifically to our disciplines.

I might copy a consultant's notes for response to a contractor's RFI, or other project related email.