How to add fonts to AutoCAD: a Vietnamese TCVN3, VNI and SHX font pack, where each goes, and why text can stay wrong

You receive a drawing from a partner, open it, and the text has the wrong shape, lines are shorter, and Vietnamese turns into strings of odd characters. The usual cause is that your machine lacks a font the sender used, or that the font and the way the text was typed do not match. The cure is to add fonts to AutoCAD of the right kind, in the right place, then close AutoCAD and start it again.

This article works through each step in AutoCAD 2027 with the acadiso.dwt template, with a screenshot for each: typing Vietnamese with SHX fonts, installing SHX fonts, installing Windows fonts, and where to copy AutoCAD fonts. It also explains what happens with missing fonts in AutoCAD, and ends with an AutoCAD SHX fonts download: a supplementary Vietnamese font pack. Writing text and creating text styles are covered in text in AutoCAD. For drafting taught properly, the Institute runs an AutoCAD course for construction.

Two kinds of font in AutoCAD

AutoCAD uses two kinds of font, and each text style picks one:

A text style picks its font in the STYLE dialog; the Autodesk documentation on STYLE describes creating, modifying and setting text styles. SHX fonts also have a second box, Big Font, for pairing an extra font; many Vietnamese font sets use exactly that box. A drawing does not contain the font file; it records only the font's name. On a machine without a file of that name, the text displays wrongly.

SHX or Windows fonts: which to use for construction drawings

The two kinds differ in how they draw letters. SHX text is made of strokes, like any line or arc. TrueType text is a filled outline. That leads to the differences below, measured in AutoCAD 2027:

The biggest advantage of SHX fonts is the first row. A lineweight applied to SHX text, through the object, the layer or a colour-based plot style, makes the text bolder or finer. You control text weight like any other line, in step with dimension and grid lines. TrueType text cannot do this: its weight is fixed by the letter shapes.

On weight of files and speed, the table shows two things. REGEN is about the same for SHX and TrueType. And when exporting to PDF, SHX text makes the file heavier, because each letter becomes many strokes while a TrueType font is embedded once. Even with PDFSHX set to 0 to drop the text comments, the romans.shx file is still 366 KB. How text behaves in PDF is covered in saving AutoCAD as PDF.

Big fonts are clearly slower: with the same 15 000 texts, romans.shx paired with ROMANSVN.SHX took 2.3 to 8.9 seconds to REGEN, against about 1.5 seconds for romans.shx alone in the same run.

Which font to use for construction drawings:

Vietnamese fonts in AutoCAD: seven correct ways

Drawings in Vietnam store Vietnamese text in several encodings. The same phrase, Mặt bằng tầng 1 ("first-floor plan"), is stored as a different string in each, and displays correctly only with the matching font.

By contrast, a standard AutoCAD SHX font such as romans.shx on its own has no shapes for accented letters: every ế, ệ, ặ, ằ, ầ shows as ?. The content still reads back with every accent, so the data is intact; only the shapes are missing. The same phrase at height 250 is 5 452 wide in romans.shx but 4 291 in Arial, so changing fonts after laying out a sheet upsets table cells; choose the font first.

Missing fonts in AutoCAD: what replaces them

Open a drawing that calls a font your machine lacks and AutoCAD reports no error; it quietly uses a substitute set by the FONTALT variable, which in 2027 is simplex.shx.

The line shrinks by almost a quarter, from 4 075 to 3 119 units. With Vietnamese text, the substitute also prints the raw encoded string, such as MÆt b»ng tÇng 1, the familiar look of a font error.

The FONTMAP variable points to acad.fmp in the user Support folder. According to Autodesk's About Substitute Fonts page, that file lets you name a separate substitute for each missing font.

Typing Vietnamese with SHX fonts

Vietnamese SHX fonts come in two kinds, and each is typed differently.

Kind 1: a main font plus a big font

In the STYLE dialog, set SHX Font to romans.shx, tick Use Big Font, and set Big Font to ROMANSVN.SHX or VN.SHX. Plain letters are typed as usual; accents are typed as a lead character plus one more.

With ROMANSVN.SHX, type the letter first, then / and one character, as below.

With VN.SHX, type the mark before the letter, as ` `` and a digit, as below.

Kind 2: single-byte SHX fonts in TCVN3 or VNI

No big font is needed; choose the font in the SHX Font box and type the string in that font's encoding, as in the table in the section above. Testing font by font gives the table below.

The last group is still useful for opening old drawings: their text was typed in that font's encoding, so having a font file of the right name is enough. For new text, use one of the two kinds above, or Unicode with Arial.

Installing SHX fonts: where to copy AutoCAD fonts

1. Close AutoCAD, or at least do not open the drawings that need the font.
2. Copy the .shx file into one of the folders AutoCAD searches:

- The user Support folder, no administrator rights needed: C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2027\R26.0\enu\support

- AutoCAD's Fonts folder: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2027\Fonts. This folder needs administrator rights; an ordinary account is refused.

1. Start AutoCAD, then open the drawing.

Close AutoCAD and start it again: no command reloads fonts

Tested with iicvn9.shx, a renamed copy of tcvn3txt.shx, and a drawing that calls that name:

Once AutoCAD has looked for a font name and not found it, it keeps the substitute for that name for the rest of the session. None of the commands tried reloaded the font; closing AutoCAD and starting it again is the sure way. Better still, copy fonts before opening drawings.

A small tip: AutoCAD also looks for fonts in the drawing's own folder. With the .shx file next to the .dwg, opened in a fresh AutoCAD session, the text displayed correctly although the Support folder lacked the font. When sending drawings to someone, putting the fonts in the same folder is the easiest option.

Name the font, not its path

A text style stores the font the way you specify it. Given a full path such as C:\t9\fonttam\iicthu.shx, the drawing records that path, which means nothing on another machine. Given a file name, such as romans.shx or iicvn9.shx, any machine with the font in a searched folder can use it.

Installing Windows fonts

TrueType fonts such as .VnTime and VNI-Times must be installed in Windows; putting the .ttf in AutoCAD's Support folder, or giving its full path, has no effect.

1. Open the folder holding the fonts and select the .ttf files you need.
2. Right-click and choose Install to install for the current account. Install for all users, marked with a shield, installs for every account and needs administrator rights.
3. Close AutoCAD and start it again.

Choosing Install copies the file to C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts and registers VNI-Times (TrueType) in the account's font list.

As with SHX fonts, a newly installed Windows font takes effect only after closing AutoCAD and starting it again. REGENALL in the running session does not help.

AutoCAD SHX fonts download: the Vietnamese supplementary pack

The pack below holds supplementary fonts only: nothing that ships with AutoCAD 2027 and nothing already in Windows. The originals were checked against the file list in the AutoCAD 2027 installer (76 .shx files) and against Windows' own component store.

Many files named .shx turned out not to be SHX fonts. 50 were TrueType fonts renamed, 5 were PostScript fonts, and the rest were empty files, lock files or a slide library. Those were dropped; only files whose first line reads AutoCAD-86 shapes, unifont or bigfont were kept. Decorative and calligraphic fonts rarely seen in technical drawings were dropped too.

Familiar Unicode fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman and Tahoma are not in the pack because Windows already has them. How to add fonts to AutoCAD for each kind is in the two installation sections above; the DOC-TRUOC.txt file in the pack repeats it. To change the font of many existing texts at once, see editing text in bulk.

Three things often repeated that are not true

Frequently asked questions

Where do I copy fonts to add them to AutoCAD?

SHX fonts go into the user Support folder, or AutoCAD's Fonts folder if you have administrator rights. .ttf fonts are installed in Windows by right-clicking and choosing Install.

Is there a command that reloads fonts after installing?

Of the commands tried, REGEN, REGENALL, setting the font again in STYLE and closing and reopening the drawing all failed. Closing AutoCAD and starting it again works.

How do I type Vietnamese with SHX fonts?

Pair romans.shx with the ROMANSVN.SHX big font and type the letter, then / and the mark, as in Ma/w/jt → Mặt. Or use the VN.SHX big font and type the mark before the letter, as in `M85at`.

Why does Vietnamese text show as MÆt b»ng?

The text was typed in TCVN3 but the machine lacks a TCVN3 font such as .VnTime, so AutoCAD uses a substitute. Install the font for that encoding, then restart AutoCAD.

What does AutoCAD use in place of a missing font?

The font named in the FONTALT variable, simplex.shx in 2027.