Hello community,
We are currently updating our company's internal drafting systems and master AutoCAD Civil 3D template files. Our primary goal is to completely eliminate legacy AutoCAD SHX "stick" fonts (like Simplex and Romans) from our workflows. We are planning to transition our company CAD text styles exclusively to the Roboto TrueType Font (TTF) family.
Our long-term plan is to seamlessly bring these same CAD files into ArcGIS Pro and publish them to ArcGIS Online.
Before we roll this standard out company-wide, we want to vet this idea with the community to make sure it will not cause major formatting, translation, or rendering problems for us down the road. We have a few specific concerns regarding the Esri ecosystem:
- ArcGIS Pro Integration: Does ArcGIS Pro cleanly handle, rotate, and scale text drawn in Roboto when reading native CAD layers or converting them to Geodatabase Annotations? Are there character clipping or unexpected word-wrapping errors we should prepare for?
- ArcGIS Online Web Environments: Since Roboto is an external Google font and is not pre-installed on every end-user operating system (like Apple iOS or macOS), how does it handle live web map environments? If a user opens our published maps on an iPad or iPhone, will the text labels completely break, shift alignment, or gracefully default to a standard system font like Arial?
- Best Practices for Web Publishing: If we convert our CAD text into native GIS Geodatabase Annotations or bake them into a Vector Tile Package (VTPK) before publishing from Pro, does Esri’s engine successfully embed the Roboto glyphs so they render identically across all browsers and devices?
We want to make sure this is a reliable, future-proof idea before updating hundreds of master project files. If your company or agency has successfully transitioned to Roboto for CAD-to-GIS delivery—or if you decided to stick to a universal default like Arial due to software limitations—we would love to hear your experiences!
Thank you
