Drawing and exporting SHX fonts in CAD Help
After trying and failing a few times to find a method to create a custom SHX font in AutoCAD, coming to Reddit seemed like the next logical step. Documentation on the subject is vastly outdated in most places so hopefully someone can shed light on this forgotten practice.
What most sources instruct:
Draw your characters with polylines
Save your characters with the MKSHAPE command
Add characters to the generated SHP file
Run the COMPILE command to export the final SHX file
There is a major problem with step #2- MKSHAPE does NOT save geometry in the correct format for compiling; let me explain. Using the dumpshx.exe, I was able to unconvert an existing SHX font into an SHP file. I quickly began editing/recompiling the data and realized, these are not just coordinates. There is a whole system of text formatting commands embedded in every line. This is why the MKSHAPE method stops making sense. There are no prompts for text box dimensions, the starting points of consecutive characters, or any other text formatting instructions.
My conclusion is the MKSHAPE command was updated to only be used for exporting geometry and no longer functions as a character definition tool. While the dumpshx.exe successfully unconverts SHX files for character redefinition & recompilation, I have yet to find a way to export CAD geometry in the format needed for SHX compilation.