How can I type Ü (U with umlaut) in drafting notes? 2

[TomOBoyle]

As the title says, I can't type an Ü letter (alt+154) in a drafting note. It appears OK in the text input box, but displays as an empty square box on the actual drawing. Is this possible? I presume Germans use NX too!

I'm on NX 10

Thanks,
Tom

 

[Bleaker]

NX has been notoriously slow in adopting Unicode. After finally getting some traction in NX 10, the process only really took off in NX 12 - which is incidentally the first version to offer Unicode support for Drafting notes. You can still use non-ASCII symbols if you set your Language for non-Unicode programs to German. All bets are off as to what happens to that text once once your draft gets to say, a Japanese customer...

[EDIT]: Looks like my conclusion here was incorrect and Unicode support in Drafting Notes is font-dependent. See responses below.

 

[NutAce]

Over here in Switzerland the ü is never used on Drawings. Instead ue is used. Same goes for ä = ae, ö = oe
Basicaly you just put an e behind the letter with umlaut.

Ronald van den Broek
Senior Application Engineer
Winterthur Gas & Diesel Ltd
NX9 / TC10.1.2

Building new PLM environment from Scratch using NX12 / TC11

 

[Bleaker]

Heathens! :-D

 

[TomOBoyle]

Thanks both, I couldn't get the unicode language change to work so I'll stick with a normal U. It's for TÜV and it would look odd as TUEV.

 

[Bleaker]

After playing with drafting notes some more, it seems the text output is font- and possibly also template-dependent. I have "Arial Unicode" set as default and it seems to be able to handle üöäß fine, even with the non-Unicode Windows setting at "English (US)". The default font might be different in your template, but if you can change it, the built-in "ideas_din" one renders German characters correctly.

 

[Toost]

I think you are jumping the trigger here, even if i do agree that NX was very late implementing support for "standard fonts".
NX 8.0 implemented support for "standard fonts" such as "Arial". That is , you could choose whether you would like to use the old "Unigraphics" fonts or the "standard fonts".
NX left the 7 bit ASCII definition (which for younger listeners means "American Standard Code for Information Interchange", which in turn ONLY supports 128 characters...) somewhere during the mid 90-ies and implemented support for a 32 bit definition. ( if i remember the timing correctly.)
That change opened up for fonts which supported international characters, BUT, UGS at the time did not include these in the supplied "Unigraphics type" fonts.
- The Unigraphics type fonts where defined to be plotted by pen plotters, which is why they appear as they do. These fonts are also good for simple engravings but maybe not that elegant.
( Single line, linear segments, no true curves. No filled characters.)
Somebody in Germany created a few font's that did include international characters, and these fonts was then included in the distribution.
We have been using the "Latin-Extended" font since that was included, it contains most European characters such as the åäö and the ü.
It also matches the ISO standard in appearance.
I doubt that the immortal "blockfont" does contain these characters. ( i have not looked.) Try the Latin-Extended if you still on "Unigraphics Fonts".

When using "standard fonts" such as Arial, there should not be any question regarding characters like the Ü. since NX8.0. If your keyboard has that character, press it.
But, if you still use the "Unigraphics fonts" , the available characters are more limited.

In the NX Preferences - Drafting, the Unigraphics fonts are preceeded by a NX icon and the standard fonts are preceeded by an "A".

( When You install NX, the install will set Arial Unicode MS the default font because it supports more international characters than the Arial.
Last week i learnt that, that font does not contain an italic version, you can not set that font italic in NX.
- There are limitations as well when using these fonts. )

An old trick is to use the Character Map tool in windows, copy the character from there into NX note editor. Same as i did here for the degree sign : 45° or greek characters Ψ Ω.
( Type "Character map" in the Windows start dialog)

Regards,
Tomas

 

[matnas]

Thanks Tomas for the history behind fonts in NX.

Just a heads up on fonts.
In NX 12 Siemens has changed the default font to Arial from "Arial Unicode MS" because this font is no longer shipped with MS Office 2016.
Computer with older MS Office ex 2013 is not effected.
If you still need this font it has to be licensed/purchased.

The fallback font in NX is Tahoma and then Arial.

More info in SFB-NX-11528 on GTAC.

/Mattias

NX5 -> NX12
I-deas 12, NX I-deas6.6
Solid Works 2017

 

[TomOBoyle]

Thanks everyone, I've certainly learned more than I expected.

My company's default font is blockfont, which is why I couldn't get the character. latin-extended works perfectly, although the font looks slightly different to blockfont.

 

[JohnRBaker]

For the record, the first version of UG/NX that was written to take full advantage of 32-bit architectures was Unigraphics D4.1, released in May 1983.

And Tomas is correct about how the old UG fonts were defined, particularly 'BLOCKFONT', which was the default. In the days of pen plotters, the plotting of a large complex Drawing could take a long time and so optimizing the pen movements was critical. And since text often accounted for most of the 'vectors' being plotted, it was critical that the 'up' movements of the pen be minimized as much as possible. As for why the old UG fonts consisted of only 'line' segments, that's because the data record of a text character consisted of ONLY 'points' which is the minimum data needed to define a series of 'line' segments.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

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