Creating a New Font Geometry File

Font geometry files (or "magic font-files") are used by Draw to export font geometry and alignment correctly to MicroStation. One of these files is required for each font used. The MicroStation font number NNN is included in the name of these files. These files contain a set of instructions and various other text data. These files should not be modified other than as described below, since the data in these files is required for Draw DGN output to work correctly.

In order to create a font geometry file for a new font, open an existing font geometry file (a set of these is supplied in %AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\dgndata) and follow the instructions displayed there. This involves using the MicroStation EDG utility to change the font used. (The EDG utility is installed alongside MicroStation, for example in ¼\Bentley\Program\Edg\edg.exe.) The instructions in the fontNNN.dgn files are repeated here.

To create an external font do the following:

• Make sure you have made a copy of this design file.

• The new name must start with 'font' appended with the font number. (for example, font186.dgn for MicroStation font number 186)

• Open this file in EDG first and type 'modify font=<n> whole' where <n> is the new font number.

• Open this file in MicroStation and type 'mdl load fixrange' (Use Keyin option).

• Compress and close the design file. (Use Compress on File menu)

• Place the file in a directory where it can be found by the OpenDGN kernel (which is used by Draw DGN output). Either this is either the current directory or a directory accessed by means of an environment variable called 'OPENDGN_FONT_DIR'.

We recommended that these fonts are placed in %AVEVA_DESIGN_EXE%\dgndata. If you need different font resource libraries for different projects, we suggest that you create sub-directories and point OPENDGN_FONT_DIR to the appropriate one for the project.