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How FAB 3000 handles TrueType Fonts

I noticed when importing DXF/DWG files that containing a True Type Font, with a text string containing more than one space between words, the spaces are always reduced to one. For example I had a text string that had 6 spaces between the words and after importing it into FAB3000 they only had one. Why can't FAB3000 see the spaces?
The font in this case was Arial and I'm using FAB3000 version 7.1.0 to make my Gerber files.
I don't think it matters what font is used. I've seen the space reduction problem using other fonts as well.
Any feedback would be great.


Thanks for your question.  The actual MText character string (typically used for TrueType fonts) can contain quite complex embedding formatting such as escape characters (\U+2261, %%U, \S), and many others which affect the appearance of the Text but have nothing to do with content.

FAB 3000 must parse these complex strings and extract just the text which is to be used in the conversion.  Feel free to send a sample DXF/DWG file to support, and we'll be happy to take a look to pinpoint missing spaces. 

Example: Here a sample to show how complex a TrueType sentence in a DXF file can be. FAB 3000 must parse that entire phrase below just to extract:
Today is going to be a great day because it is not Monday!

{\fVivaldi|b0|i0|c0|p0;A.^I\LToday\l \fVivaldi|b0|i1|c0|p0;is going to be\fVivaldi|b0|i0|c0|p0; a \fTahoma|b0|i0|c0|p0;\Lgreat day\fVivaldi|b0|i0|c0|p0;\l \fVerdana|b0|i0|c0|p0;because it is \fUtsaah|b0|i0|c0|p0;not\fWide Latin|b0|i0|c0|p0;Monday!}

As with any conversion, keeping things simple will always allow for the best results.

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SUGGESTION: Are you using "multiple spaces" for alignment purposes (i.e have once long sentence and use multiple spaces in-between to align words in a column)?  In my experience, it would be more reliable to break the long sentences to individual ones and place each word or phrase as separate MText entities in the appropriate areas to allow perfect alignment.


Thank you for getting back to me on this topic.

I have many years experience working with text in AutoCAD and agree keeping things simple is always the best.  We don't use Mtext for the reason that with multi-line text some of our conversion software does not understand the carriage return and will move two lines into one long line of text.  Instead we use Single line text in AutoCAD and that works the best.

Our Customer's supply the DWG/DXF data that we have to convert to 274x Gerber.  I wish they didn't use the many spaces but it is a Single line text and not Mtext.  They use it to separate lets say, "Part Number" and "Date" in a title block leaving lots of room for readability I guess.

I love FAB3000 for being able to handle lots of different fonts but I'm also afraid that the text will shift into important geometry if I'm not careful.  Some of our customers get very upset when they see their nomenclature shift getting too close to working geometry.

Text is a tricky thing to convert and the goal for us is to convert AutoCAD data to a Geber file that is exactly like the Customer's original.  Even with some of the stick fonts like TXT there is a noticeable difference with the width of some of the characters like the letter "A" in the .SHX and the letter "A" in FAB3000 .FNT font.  There are ways to work around all these things but text is one of those things that you have to know what you are doing or the conversion will fail.

 Thanks again for reading my post.

Any improvements to how FAB3000 handles text would be great plus to this software.

Thanks.

Feel free to send any sample file(s) to support @ numericalinnovations.com and we'll be able to let you know exactly what occurred and why?
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