Computed Aided Design (CAD) - Font configurations
This section details common workflows for ensuring searchable text when printing Portable Document Format (PDF) files.
The sections are broken down by software type and will be expanded over time, if you have any requests to capture specific software, please reach out to our documentation team.
Information will be consistently updated here, if you see any information that is not up to date, please reach out to our documentation team: docs@nodehex.com
E## General details
Printing of engineering drawings has always contained critical text and historically the need for text to be searchable in digital format has been secondary to it's intended purpose of use on site, where drawings are printed physically and used during construction.
As the digitalisation rate increases in construction as well as client and government organisations implementing stardards to ensure long term archival and storage (PDF/A), searchable text is becoming a key element to verify in PDF files.
There is also internal benefit to ensuring that PDF files are searchable, as it enables data harvesting to be done at scale to enable machine learning, Large Language Models (LLM/AI) and other analytics that are considerably harder when Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has to be done prior to data extraction.
AutoCAD
Autodesk have support articles that detail how to appropriately ensure that AutoCAD (including Civil 3D) print searchable text, however general recomendations are:
- Use TrueType fonts to ensure text is searchable.
- Do not modify the font styling of the TrueType font.
- Ensure the Z coordinate value of all text objects is set to zero.
A PDF containing SHX text exported as vector geometry with comment annotations will not comply with PDF/A standards.