AutoCAD Mixed Bold Appearance of Text - Updated
Issue:
This issue can occur in any type of AutoCAD; however, it appears most often in AutoCAD Electrical. When using certain fonts some characters will appear “bolder” than others even though the “Bold” format is not in use. As you can see in the image below, the “M’s” appear to be more bold than other text.
Causes:
This issue appears to be related to the Font Mapping file in use and the Font that is used. This is primarily seen with a “roman” font when the “acade.fmp” font mapping file is in use. You may find this behavior with other combinations, but this seems to be the most common configuration to exhibit the behavior noted above.
Update: After further investigation and discussion with Autodesk support, the RomanS_IV50 font is the source of the discrepancies.
Solution:
Update: While the original solution published with this article is still an option, a newer solution may be preferable for you.
Instead of adjusting the font mapping, which you can still do, you may instead want to replace the original font that ships with AutoCAD using the font file provided here: https://www.dropbox.com/t/db6JlM8xjnWt2Fib
To replace the font that is installed with AutoCAD, you will need to remove the existing RomanS_IV50 font. One way you can do so is to go to your Windows Search and search for “fonts”. This will bring up your settings window with the Fonts tools.
Once you have brought that up, find the “RomanS” font family and select it.
This will display the fonts in that family so you can remove the existing font and replace it with the font you downloaded from the link above.
Choose the font that displays the full name of “RomanS_IV50” when selected (you may need to choose each one since the name doesn’t show until chosen). Once the correct font has been selected, uninstall the font.
To install the new font, just drag and drop to the location shown below.
Once the new font has been installed you will be able to go back to the font family and verify that it installed.
As you can see above, the Full Name of the font is embedded in the font file so you are not required to rename the downloaded file, although you can if you would prefer to. Since the new font file is replacing the old, there is no need to change any of the default mappings unless you prefer to.
The only drawback to this solution is that others who may utilize your documents may not have this font so the text would appear to them based on their system settings. You can provide them with this font if you’d like so that they would have the same results when opening your documents.
Original Solution: The steps that have been used to resolve the issue most successfully are as follows. Go to “Options” either via the right-click menu or from the File menu.
From the options,
- Select the Files tab
- Expand “Text Editor, Dictionary, and Font File Names”
- Expand “Font Mapping File”
- Note the currently specified font mapping file. In this example it is the “acade.fmp”
- Use “Browse” to navigate to the location of the font mapping file you wish to use
- Select the appropriate font mapping file. In this example the “acad.fmp” file was used
- Apply the changes you just made
After making the change, you may want to restart the software and verify that the change has taken effect before proceeding. The results should be as shown below:
If the settings change indicated above does not resolve the issue, an alternative solution is to change the fonts you have in use to a font type that does not exhibit the undesired behavior, such as “Simplex.shx”.
Related Topics:
- RomanS font looks faded when plotting from AutoCAD
- Text is lighter or faded in a PDF published from AutoCAD Electrical
- Faint, light, choppy or distorted display in Adobe Acrobat or Reader with a PDF created by AutoCAD or Civil 3D
About the Author
Follow on Linkedin More Content by Heath White
