Five things that change when you move to Arial
1. The stored characters. The old font drew something that is not Hebrew as Hebrew: English keys, DOS codes, or words stored last letter first. In Arial you see what is really stored. Every such label has to be rewritten as Hebrew. The guide to Hebrew fonts in AutoCAD explains how to tell which kind a drawing holds.
2. The Backwards flag. The old Hebrew fonts were built with mirrored letters, and each label, sometimes the style too, carried a flag that flipped them back. In Arial the letters are ordinary, and the flag that stayed flips every one of them. It has to be cleared on each single-line label and in the style itself. The guide to reversed Hebrew shows how.
3. Numbers inside Hebrew labels. Numbers stored together with Hebrew in drawing order will flip: 32 shows as 23, and 1:50 as 05:1. They still look like valid numbers, so each one needs checking.
4. Width. Arial is about a quarter narrower than the old Hebrew fonts, and nearly a third narrower than some. A label that filled a table cell or a title line now stops halfway, and the drawing looks emptied out. Each label's Width Factor can bring the width back.
5. Position. Two surprises here:
- Fonts typed as English keys drew the label leftward from its insertion point. In Arial the same point becomes the start of the label, which leaves its cell and lands beside it.
- For right- or centre-justified text, AutoCAD also stores a start point worked out from the old font's width. After the swap it is wrong, and in a column of labels each one drifts by a different amount. DWG TrueView, for one, places labels from that point.
And multi-line text?
Multi-line text (MTEXT) can carry its own font inside the text, and then changing the style does not touch it. If some labels stay in the old font after the swap, this is why.
By hand, or in one click
By hand, each of the five is done label by label. In a drawing with thousands of labels that is not practical, so most offices stop after the first step and are left with a drawing that only looks right on a computer that has the old font.
Gibberish's repair does all five at once. It rewrites the stored characters as Hebrew, clears the Backwards flag on labels and styles, puts numbers back in order, moves them to a thin font that ships with Windows, fits each label's width to the ground it covered before, and moves insertion points so that every label stays exactly where it was. The plugin that runs it from inside AutoCAD is coming soon. Join the waiting list and we'll let you know when you can download it. You can already check a whole drawing for free and see some of its labels before and after the repair, or decode single labels.
Quick questions
Why Arial and not some other Hebrew font?
Because Arial ships with every copy of Windows and includes Hebrew, so the drawing opens correctly for anyone who receives it. A font the recipient doesn't have gets replaced by something else, and you are back where you started.
Will plots look different?
Yes. Arial is heavier than an .shx font, which is drawn with a single stroke: its strokes are about 18% of the letter's height. By default Gibberish writes in a thin font that also ships with Windows and includes Hebrew, with strokes about 8% of the letter's height. An office that prefers its own .shx font can keep it, on the condition that everyone who opens the drawing has that font too.
I changed the font in the style, and now every label has jumped out of its table.
That is point 5: the old font drew leftward from the insertion point, and Arial draws rightward from it. The swap did not break the drawing; it exposed how the drawing was built. Undo (U) takes you back.