Hebrew shows as symbols or question marks in AutoCAD

Where it comes from

Under DOS, Hebrew letters sat at codes 128 to 154. Windows moved them to 224 to 250, and later to Unicode. The .shx fonts written for AutoCAD in the DOS era kept the old positions, and drawings made with them still hold the DOS codes today.

We found 5,487 such labels in real client drawings, almost as many as Hebrew typed as English letters. Most were in the font hebtxt, the rest in simpheb, oronbold, caes-k and atir. Here too the name is only a hint: one hebtxt may store DOS codes and another hebtxt Windows codes.

How to recognize it

Select a label and type LIST. If the Text line shows symbols such as ‚ ƒ „ … † ‡ ‰ ™, or vertical bars, this is your case. The exact symbols depend on Windows' language settings, so the same drawing can look different on two computers.

How to read a label like this

This is how the codes looked in the drawings we tested:

Four letters, ב, ם, ן and נ, have no symbol in Windows' Western character table. In their place you see a box, a question mark or nothing, so a label can look like it is missing a letter.

When the question marks are real

If LIST also shows actual question marks, the letters may have been lost in an earlier save, when the drawing passed between computers with different language settings. A question mark keeps no trace of the letter it replaced, so no tool can bring it back, Gibberish included. In that case ask the sender for the original file, before it was saved again.

What to do

If you only need to read it, the table is enough. If the drawing has to look right, get the original font file, exactly the same file, from whoever sent it and put it in the drawing's folder. The guide to Hebrew fonts in AutoCAD explains why it must be the same file, and why that does not fix what is stored.

If you need to work on the drawing or move it to an ordinary font, the codes have to become Hebrew letters. By hand, that means retyping every label. Gibberish's repair does that for the whole drawing at once: it recognizes DOS codes whether they show as symbols or as raw codes, writes Hebrew in their place, and leaves each label 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.