Use Text Fonts for International Work (Concept)

Several factors affect your choosing, entering, and displaying international text in a drawing.

The program supports the Unicode character-encoding standard. An SHX font encoded using the Unicode standard font can contain many more characters than are defined in your system; therefore, to use a character not directly available from the keyboard, you can enter the escape sequence \U+nnnn, where nnnn represents the Unicode hexadecimal value for the character.

Beginning with AutoCAD 2007, all SHX shape fonts are encoded with the Unicode standard with the exception of Big Fonts. When choosing a text font for international work, you can use either a TrueType Font or a Big Font.

Asian Big Font SHX Files

Asian alphabets contain thousands of non-ASCII characters. To support such text, the program provides a special type of shape definition known as a Big Font file. You can set a style to use both regular and Big Font files.

Asian Language Big Fonts Included in the Product
Font File Name	Description
@extfont2.shx	Japanese vertical font (a few characters are rotated to work correctly in vertical text)
bigfont.shx	Japanese font, subset of characters
chineset.shx	Traditional Chinese font
extfont.shx	Japanese extended font, level 1
extfont2.shx	Japanese extended font, level 2
gbcbig.shx	Simplified Chinese font
whgdtxt.shx	Korean font
whgtxt.shx	Korean font
whtgtxt.shx	Korean font
whtmtxt.shx	Korean font

When you specify fonts using -STYLE, the assumption is that the first name is the normal font and the second (separated by a comma) is the Big Font. If you enter only one name, it's assumed that it is the normal font and any associated Big Font is removed. By using leading or trailing commas when specifying the font file names, you can change one font without affecting the other, as shown in the following table.

Specifying fonts and Big Fonts at the Command prompt
Enter this ...	To specify this ...
[font name],[big font name]	Both normal fonts and Big Fonts
[font name],	Only a normal font (Big Font unchanged)
,[big font name]	Only a Big Font (normal font unchanged)
[font name]	Only a normal font (Big Font, if any, removed)
ENTER (null response)	No change

Note Long file names that contain commas as font file names are not accepted. The comma is interpreted as a separator for an SHX font-Big Font pair.