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Fonts not reading properly in 7.6v2

SirSlarty

New Member
I upgraded to FlexiPRO 7.6v2 in February. Have been using FlexiPRO 6.5 previously. I am having problems with fonts.

When I open an old design in 7.6 that was saved in 6.5, it won't read the fonts properly. The fonts ARE installed. I get a menu in Flexi asking me to which font I'd like to subsitute. I selcet the exact same font it's looking for. What happens is that the font's tracking and other attributes get read wrong. This only happens with certain fonts.

I've been opening up the old design's in Flexi 6.5 to avoid the hassle of fixing the old designs. However, if I leave/go on vaction, the next designer might not know what to do when they open up old designs.

How do I tell Flexi 7.6v2 to properly open up old designs?
 

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
Have you ever changed the spacing, kerning or other preferences in v 6.5? I would open 6.5 and have a look at all settings for font preferences and then duplicate them in 7.6.2 to see if that helps.

No idea though as to why it would want to substitute for the same font.

You may want to go through your older files and save separate versions with the type converted to outlines. That would at least preserve the job as a graphic and you could note the fonts used if you ever have to edit any type in the future.
 

SirSlarty

New Member
Hmmm, all the font settings in 6.5 are set at default it seems.

Saving all the old design files with text converted to outlines would be a very big project. There's a good number of them from 2001 til 2005. I started here in the middle of 2005. All the files I'm having problems with are from the previous designer.

I belive the problem definitely is with certain fonts. Looks like the trouble makers are the FlexiFonts that probably came with my version of Flexi 6.5.

Here're some screenshots of a recent example:

the file in Flexi 6.5, note it has FF by the font name

what happens when I open in Flexi 7.6

selecting the same font

the tracking gets wierd, the font is now listed as a TrueType, also the bg grid shows up for some reason
 

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
I can tell you where the root of this is but do not have any solution to offer.

It goes back to the merger of Scanvec and Amiable. Scanvec, in their software, CasMate and Inspire, had always supplied their fonts in a proprietary format. The fonts they supplied were mostly licensed as a package from Agfa. They were not in TrueType format.

Amiable, with their FlexiSign product, had always been true open architecture and they used fonts in both TrueType and Postscript Type 1 format.

When the merger occurred, the first product to come out of it was the Flexi 6 versions. The effect of Scanvec was obvious as they wanted all of their users of CasMate and Inspire to migrate to FlexiSign. So they incorporated their old font handling features into the new product. These were never handled in the same way as Flexi had handled TTF and Type 1 fonts and the kerning/spacing would definitely be different. The same would be true for actually locating the original Agfa font (Prefix of CG) rather than locating the TrueType of Type 1 equivilent of it.

Hang in there though. I am going to see if I can get a better answer for you though.
 

Matthew Scher

New Member
The cause of this issue is that the original font in 6.x was in Casfont format. The font in 7.x is in TrueType format. There is a simple work around for this. Just copy the original font from the 6.x folder to the 7.x folder.

1. Browse for C:\Program Files\FlexiSIGN 6.x\CASFonts
2. Copy all the files from that folder to C:\Program Files\FlexiSIGN 7.x\CASFonts
3. Run Flexi 7. It will now show the exact font that was used in Flexi 6.

When the casfonts were converted to TrueType, the kerning was modified. That is why you will see different kerning values with the TT version of the font. Using the casfont version directly will keep the original kerning values.

Best regards,
Matthew
 
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