Exporting Draw Drawings Containing AVEVA Fonts

The product is issued with a very large number of AVEVA font files that have been assembled over a long period from the public domain, in-house and the user community. They have all been translated to the AutoCAD standard and take the form of pairs of source (.shp) and compiled (.shx) files.

These notes discuss how to install these fonts into MicroStation in line with the original Draw drawing. Experienced MicroStation users may know alternative ways of doing this.

An alternative approach is to use MicroStation standard fonts similar to the AVEVA fonts, and accept some differences in text output.

If you use Draw’s alternative character set for characters such as ¥ © ¼ or W you will need to install AVEVA’s symbol font.

The set of AVEVA fonts required in MicroStation is project dependent. The supplied font resource file E3DAPS.rsc uses the AVEVA fonts associated with the APS project. Individual projects may have different fonts in use, so will require a different font resource file. Refer to Creating a New Font Resource Library for further information.

Font resource files should be installed alongside the corresponding MicroStation font resource files, typically in

... \bentley\workspace\system\symb

E3DAPS.rsc uses particular MicroStation font numbers (201 to 207 for text fonts and 255 for the symbol font). These are mapped to Draw fonts using the MapFont switch in Draw. It is possible that these font numbers may clash with fonts in other font resource files in use. If this happens, refer to Changing MicroStation Font Numbers for further information.

When you install additional fonts into MicroStation, Draw needs additional information on the font geometry to export the drawing. This is supplied as a set of font geometry files, fontNNN.dgn (where NNN is a MicroStation font number referred to in the font resources file).

These fontNNN.dgn files must be in either the current directory, or a directory accessed by the environment variable OPENDGN_FONT_DIR. This variable OPENDGN_FONT_DIR should be set to %AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\dgndata or wherever the font geometry files have been installed.

Font geometry files are supplied for the fonts used in the APS project. These correspond to E3DAPS.rsc and are supplied in the directory AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\dgndata. Instructions as to how to create further fontNNN.dgn files for other fonts are available, refer to Select the Required .rsc Library for further information.

AVEVA font numbers are mapped onto font file names, All AVEVA fonts are supplied in the %AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\autodraftfonts directory, in AutoCAD format as .shx files.