Couple Font Issues with Revit

I ran across a couple issues with Revit and using Fonts, whether they are “custom” fonts or if they are out-of-the-box Windows fonts.

First off, when looking at the Windows Fonts folder, you’ll see TrueType fonts (TTF) and OpenType fonts (OTF) and you’ll see pretty much the same list when you look at the font list in Revit.  Well, not all OpenType fonts are created equal and it actually matters when it comes to Revit!  OpenType fonts come in two “flavors”…one being made with TrueType Outlines and the other is made with Postscript Outlines.  Windows doesn’t care which “type” they are, but Revit does.  It took me a second to adjust my eyes to notice that my font list in Revit wasn’t matching the font list in the Windows font folder. I verified this with Autodesk and Revit can only read OTF’s that are made with TrueType Outlines.  So if you are investigating (or investing) in a custom font, make sure it’s either a TrueType font or an OpenType font with TrueType outlines!

The other thing I’ve run into recently was with using either custom fonts or “hand-type” fonts from Windows.  Apparently, fonts when read in Revit do not keep their true size!  Take a look at the image below.  You can see that only ONE of the five are actually 1/4”!  So if you are going to use a non-blocky type font, be careful as the size you want might not actually be true!

I again threw this one to Autodesk and here’s what they had to say…

“This is a known issue with Revit and TrueType font types. Depending on the font type it may not always match the actual dimension it is displayed in Revit as.

I added your case onto the development team request, and notified the team. This is scheduled to be addressed in a future product release.”

Well, in order to get the text to actually to be 1/4” when plotted, you have to increase the size parameter up 1/32” or some other value.  It varies with different fonts, so there’s no rule or anything that I came across for getting the true size when plotted.  I know many might be thinking…it’s such small difference, just leave it alone…now one will notice!  Yes, you definitely can leave it alone and some may not notice.  But, I was surprised to see how much difference it can make when the text is used in Tags and referenced against what it looked like in the AutoCAD symbols.  Big difference in what we used (which was the Graphite font by the way).

Oh, and regarding this being addressed in a future product release…I’m guessing 2012, but hopefully in 2011.