Hi folks
Thanks to those who replied with comments and advice. I'll summarise here, I've yet to decide what we'll do in our system: it's still a work in progress. If we do switch, I'll post further details of that here.
Regards
Edwin
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We went to Triumvurate True Type font when we recently went to CREO2
You are correct, the PDF filesize went up substantially - but with these new quad core computers and 8-16-32 gigs of memory - it's not really a big issue for us - unless you have a small email size limit. Most of the whopper PDF's are huge assembly prints, and we don't email those out to have built, anyway. I can actually read a D size when printed at A - only TT fonts allow this resolution
The drawings look fabulous with TT Fonts.
We won't be going back to the stroked fonts of the past
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This is only a piece of the puzzle, but for what its worth we have changed our drawing font to Arial because of the creation of PDF drawings we saw that the PDF used Arial and thus the PDF drawing looks like the Pro/E drawing if using the Arial font in Pro/E. If you use the Pro/E font things shift and get out of place when the PDF creator translates the font.
Good luck with this issue.
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Was faced with a similar issue a few years back. I redefined the standards using true type fonts.
Instead of PDF size, the negative impact was to ProductView performance.
After reviewing the performance hit, (the cost was high for the users with the weakest computers), we stayed the course with the new style and let the hardware play catch up.
In the end, it was the right decision. The new layout was very easy to read and would not have been possible with ptc fonts.
As for testing, I'm sure you have tried the various export options for adobe? Stroke text, change the endcap etc. Perhaps there may be a more efficient configuration?
Anyhow, there is no excuse to sacrifice legibility this day and age.
All the best,
Ps. Have appreciated your contributions to the community through the years. Thank you.
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We have converted over to use True Type fonts in our ProE (WF5) drawings and also in our PDFs made from within ProE.
There is a config to point to a fonts directory which we set to the standard Windows fonts directory. We use Arial Narrow but that was my choice for various reasons. Gives a very clear font on the drawings.
This also gives us very close to WSYWIG from the drawing itself in ProE.
If you use something like ISOFONT in your drawings then the "use truetype font" when making the PDF gives some undefined TT Font match from somewhere (was never able to trqack this down even with the help of our VAR) so this can affect filesize.
We are pretty happy with the end result.
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In Reply to Edwin Muirhead:
Hi folks
I've searched the forums but found nothing recent around this... In the past, I looked at updating our default CAD font from the default 'font' to a more appealing/modern style, like Arial or similar. However, at the time it seemed to greatly increase the PDF file size - and since we auto-PDF everything I decided to stay put at that point.
Now we're upgrading to Creo 2, pushing out new titleblocks and bringing other groups onto the system, I thought it would be a good time to re-visit the topic of fonts.
However: it still seems to increase PDF size if I use 'win_font' or similar, and there's nota great selection of fonts in Creo anyway...
So, does anyone have any tips or advice around improving the look of drawings with fonts?
Do you think the appearance out-weighs the file size?
Do you know of a font that behaves similarly to 'font' in terms of size, but looks better on-screen?
Thanks in advance for any help, I'll post a summary.
Regards
Edwin Muirhead, CAD Manager, Weatherford
