Font handling problems on Macintosh

Written by Balázs Biacs

You may encounter the following problems when trying to use certain Bitmap fonts on Macintosh:
Parts of texts are not displayed in OpenGL mode (ArchiCAD 8 only) or are missing when plotted (ArchiCAD 8 and 7.0)

These problems only occur when trying to use bitmap fonts.
There are two kinds of fonts that are problematic:

• Older bitmap fonts (NFNT, FONT type fonts)
• More recent SFNT type bitmap fonts (i.e. VT100)

The NFNT/FONT type bitmap fonts

We suggest completely avoiding use of these fonts for the following reasons:

NFNT/FONT Problems
Operating System	2D Display		Plotted Result
	OpenGL in 2D
	ON	OFF
Mac OS 9.2	not displayed	OK	OK
Mac OS X 10.1	not displayed	OK	not plotted
Mac OS X 10.2.	not displayed	OK	not plotted

Fonts that cannot be chosen (are missing in the fonts' list) in the Native TextEdit application are NFNT or FONT type bitmap fonts.

The SFNT type bitmap fonts

We suggest completely avoiding use these fonts as well for the following reasons:

SFNT bitmap font Problems
Operating System	2D Display		Plotted Result
	OpenGL in 2D
	ON	OFF
Mac OS 9.2	OK	OK	OK
Mac OS X 10.1	OK	OK	OK
Mac OS X 10.2.	characters missing	OK	characters missing

Unfortunately SFNT type bitmap fonts can be chosen in TextEdit, so currently the only way to find out if the font is SFNT is to test it on screen. When zooming in on a text it'll look like this (the pixels that it's made up of can be seen clearly):

Page last updated: Thursday, June 10, 2004