Autodesk Inventor® Hardware Web Site

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Last Updated
8/17/2010
Frequently Asked Questions



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51. Can I improve the look of "Stroke Fonts" imported from Autodesk AutoCAD or other sources.

Autodesk Inventor® R8 contains several improvements that together should substantially improve the situation for users of so-called stroke fonts fonts consisting of thin strokes that, up to now, have become invisible or hard to read at small sizes in Autodesk Inventor®.

Stroked Fonts

  1. In the Autodesk Inventor® registry there is an entry called "Stroke Font List", which is a string item containing a comma separated list of the names of fonts that need special handling to look good in Autodesk Inventor®.
  2. Depending on the available graphics hardware and various registry settings, there are two ways we do this:
    1. image glyphs by drawing strokes
    2. stay with our normal approach of using texture mapping to image text glyphs, but adjust the texture to look better at small sizes on screen
  3. The registry entry that controls this is:
    1. [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareAutodeskInventor RegistryVersion 8.0 SystemPreferencesDisplay]
  4. "Stroke Font List"="RomanS,RomanD" ( "Stroke Font List" is a string value.)
  5. (Note that "8.0" is the Autodesk Inventor® version. please change as appropriate.)
  6. If mip-mapping of fonts is enabled (see below), "stroke" fonts (any font named in the above list) will be imaged as "adjusted" texture fonts, otherwise they will be drawn using lines tracing the outline of the character.
  7. You can force a given font to always be drawn using lines (rather than texture maps) -- if the name of a font in the list is followed by a "!", as in
    1. "Stroke Font List"="RomanS!,RomanD!"
    2. it will be always be drawn using strokes, whether or not texture mip-mapping is available.
  8. Starting with Autodesk Inventor® 8, the adjusted texture font approach is now working much better. Users are encouraged to try it first. If they don't like what they see for a particular font, they can add the '!' character after its name in the list.
    1. Note that there should be no additional spaces in the above string (spaces embedded within font names like Century Gothic are fine), just names, commas, and optional '!' characters.
  9. The attached zip file contains a .reg file that sets Stroke Font List for Autodesk Inventor® R8.0 to a list of fonts that have been found benefit from this treatment. Just double click on the file within WinZip to apply it to your registry. If there are other fonts you wish to add to this list, you can extract and edit the .reg file before applying it to the registry, or add them (using the regedit tool) after applying the .reg file.
    1. As always, changes to registry entries should be done carefully, while Autodesk Inventor® is not running.
    2. The registry change will have to be re-applied if autodesk Autodesk Inventor® is re-installed.
    3. The change will have to be applied for each user of Autodesk Inventor® on a given workstation.


Note: It is highly recommended that you download and install the driver certified on this web site before reporting problems.