Exporting Draft 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 Draft drawing. Experienced MicroStation users may know alternative ways of doing this.

Two alternative approaches are:

• Use AVEVA’s Fontconverter utilities to create PDMS-compatible versions from .shp versions of the fonts you wish to use in MicroStation

• Use MicroStation standard fonts similar to the AVEVA fonts, and accept some differences in text output.

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

It is not possible to install a 16 bit font (.SHX) file into Microstation/J or earlier.

The set of AVEVA fonts required in MicroStation is project dependent. The supplied font resource file pdmsSamFont.rsc uses the AVEVA fonts associated with the SAM project. Individual projects may have different fonts in use, so will require a different font resource file. See Creating a New Font Resource Library in Installing AVEVA Fonts into MicroStation for instructions on how to create such resource files.

Font resource files should be installed alongside the corresponding MicroStation font resource files, typically in ...\bentley\workspace\system\symb

pdmsSamFont.rsc uses particular MicroStation font numbers (201 to 207 for text fonts and 255 for the symbol font). These are mapped to Draft fonts using the MapFont switch in Draft. It is possible that these font numbers may clash with fonts in other font resource files in use. If this happens, see section Changing Microstation Font Numbers in Installing AVEVA Fonts into MicroStation for instructions on how to modify MicroStation font numbers.

When you install additional fonts into MicroStation, Draft 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 %PDMSEXE%\dgndata or wherever the font geometry files have been installed.

Font geometry files are supplied for the fonts used in the SAM project. These correspond to pdmsSamFont.rsc and are supplied in the directory PDMSEXE%\dgndata. Section Select the Required .rsc Library in Installing AVEVA Fonts into MicroStation contains instructions as to how to create further fontNNN.dgn files for other fonts.

Mapping the Installed Fonts discusses how AVEVA font numbers are mapped onto font file names. All AVEVA fonts are supplied in the %PDMSEXE%\autodraftfonts directory, in AutoCAD format as .shx files.