Extrudable fonts

Is there somewhere to get fonts suitable for extruding, other than what Pro
already gives us? Is there a way to make ttf's extrudable?

 

But you can't use them to create recessed or raised letters, can you?

 

I just did this yesterday. Copied Arial Rounded MT Bold from my PC's
font folder into my /text/font folder in Wildfire, restarted WF and I
was able to use it in my sketch for an extruded protrusion. Then it
went into our FDM and I had the part in my hand this morning.

 

Either my memory is shot or you didn't used tp be able to use ttf's that
way. All you had were 3-4 (maybe just 1) fonts you could extrude.

 

Yes, you're right about the previous lack of support within Pro/e for the
standard outline, vector fonts like PostScript and TrueType. It was very
esoteric, proprietary and restricted. It is less so now, but the technology
is the same. Pro/e copies the font outline as lines and arcs, it ignores
built in font styles like Bold and Italic. And its 'filling' of a font face
is a series of hatch lines, placed together very closely. It's not a font
property, it's Pro/e sleight of hand. And none of the font properties or
text make it into a PDF of the drawing so the drawings are not searchable
for text.

David Janes

 

Fonts are translated correctly and searcheable with Acrobat and Catalog
in WF3 when you do File>Save a Copy and save as type PDF.


Regards

 

I guess I shifted the discussion to drawing mode. But it started out on
modeled extrusions of text or, I would guess, sketches. And in neither case
does a search find text. In part mode, it's not even capable of searching
for notes or text.

I see though that, in drawing mode, the search function turns up notes and I
see that 'Save a copy' has PDF as an option. I'll have to restart Pro/e; it
crashed when I tried to make the PDF. Well, it did indeed save a drawing
with notes intact, searchable and selectable text, as a PDF. It did some
funny translating of fonts or font substitutions, though. That's
disappointing, means they got it
60, 70 percent of the way and said 'good enough, fix it later'. Anyway, this
comes in WF3, effortless PDFs. Also means the possibility of simple batch
processing of a directory of drawings into PDFs, unattended, overnight,
without a
computer science degree.

David Janes

 

Unfortunately, unlike when doing a print to PDF you cannot specify a
destination page size, XY offsets, destination folder, etc. Our
drawing templates start at 0,0 and this produces PDFs with the border
edges at the extreme low left of the paper space, which results in
cropped paper prints.

PTC also removed the Adobe PDF and Adobe Color PDF printer drivers from
WF3 so you must either do a File>Save a Copy or have your own copy of
Distiller - which unfortunately negates any mapkeys for PDFs you may
have because the Windows print dialog opens.

I was able to recreate the previous functionality of Adobe PDF using
Ghostscript and some batch files that run under the Printer Command in
the pcf file.

Regards