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Importing Chinese DWG Files


Diamond

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Hi,

We are receiving DWG files from clients in China labelled with Chinese Characters. Some of our staff speak Mandarin and Cantonese. We would like a way that the Chinese characters are imported into our drawings. I have tried substituting Chinese AutoCAD fonts for Chinese Mac fonts. It appears the standard Chinese font that should be being used is Arial Unicode. This is able to display both English and Chinese characters (and more besides).

Has anyone had any experience (and success) importing Chinese DWG files?

Thank you in advance.

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We are in the same boat. I am a theatrical lighting designer in California using Chinese Vectorworks 2013.

Imported Chinese DWG files contain mysterious characters that common reports cannot be generated!! The explanation I got from Vectorworks? local distributor in China said that was because I was not entering Chinese character in a supported manner. I had no problem with common software such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe!!

Has anyone got some experience to share ???

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Hi,

I have just posted a question about Japanese VW, but you guys seem to be in the know on this one.

I am still trying to figure out the basics of converting a 2012 English PC VW file to a 2009 Japanese Mac one. The only text is in the layers and classes, which I think should be easy enough to change.

When you say renaming the file, what do you mean? Is this specifically a text issue? I have tried exporting as an earlier version in VW, dwg, and dxf format. But to no avail!

Your wisdom would be much appreciated!

~Nicole

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I am please to be able to share experiences with someone using VW in languages other than English.

To start, I have never tried opening files using Chinese VW2009 as the Chinese version was never around till 2012!! I am using ChineseVW2013.

Chinese VW tends to generate classes using both languages, i.e. the name of class is in two languages and/or the class appears twice, once in English and once in Chinese!! - more common in imported DWG files.

VW distributor in China said the package can only read one particular font of Chinese characters (宋体font)? not sure if it may be problem in Japanese, i.e. merely changing the text may not help.

Sorry that I cannot give much help.

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Hi Nicole,

This is an old post, but I will weigh in again...

Regarding the renaming of files, we often receive DWG files named in Chinese characters. Vw English doesn't like to import these files, we we just rename them in the Finder (on Mac) and they import fine.

Once we import them, we find many of the Chinese characters come out as question marks. This is because the AutoCAD end are using SHX fonts which are not a font at all--they are a linetype that Vw can't read. If text has been written using a SHX font, as far as I am aware, there are no work arounds to get text into Vw (I would imagine it would be the same for both Vw English & Chinese).

For Chinese characters that have been written in a TrueType font, these need to be substituted on import for Arial Unicode MS, as this will give the highest probability of being able to render the Chinese text. (You can choose others, but I have gone for a K.I.S.S. approach). Unfortunately, this font does not render bold or italics, so if you want to display English in bold or italics you would have to use a combination of Arial Unicode MS, and Arial, or any other normal English font of your choice.

Anyone else have any thoughts? Thanks.

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