One of my favorite parts of AU (and all events, really) is meeting blog readers and Twitter friends in person. It’s just so nice to know that there are real people out there! One reader I had the pleasure of meeting recently is Dave, who traveled to AU 2010 all the way from Hawaii. But Dave had a font problem. A certain SHX file was working fine on one computer with AutoCAD, but refused to display properly on another computer with AutoCAD LT. It was in the proper support path and wasn’t being swapped out by FONTMAP or FONTALT. So what was wrong? As much as I hate to admit it, I was stumped. I couldn’t think of what might cause this behavior. Fortunately, Dave continued investigating when he got back to Hawaii, and e-mailed me with the solution. He’d noticed that some font files displayed as blue in Windows Explorer, instead of the usual black. Turns out that those files have been compressed, using option in the “Advanced” section of the file properties. The trouble with that is that compressed SHX files can’t be used by AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT. The good thing is that fixing the problem is as easy as unchecking the box. So if you have fonts that mysteriously won’t appear in your drawings, here’s one more place to look. And if it solves your problem, send your thanks to Dave. :-)

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