Fat Fuzzy Text

I've done my searching around to try and figure this one out, but I'm coming up empty handed.

When I saved this file at home on Autocad 2014 everything was fine. When I got in to the office and opened it up on Autocad LT 2011 some of my text decided to go bonkers.

Text is at z of 0. View target is 0. I read that certain fonts can have issues, but as you can see in the screenshot that can't be the problem either since the same exact text is just fine in some locations but not others. Check the As.

Any ideas what I should be trying next to fix this? It comes out on a PDF looking just fine. But in CAD it looks like that and drives me nuts.

Problem text.dwg

Forgot the DWG. Since it was a company file I had to clean it out of most things, but this should still have enough in it to reproduce the problem. It still looked that way for me anyways.

So the problem is that some of the big A's have jagged edges?

So the problem is that some of the big A's have jagged edges?

Ya basically. They should all look like the one right over the quick properties window.

When I open your file, all the A's look the same - all are smooth.

Do you have Hardware Acceleration on? And Smooth Line Display on? (Both under the grey or blue circle at the bottom right of you screen called Graphic Performance)

Have you updated your graphic card drivers?

Does it make a difference if you do a REGEN? If you zoom in, do they look better?

I know that none of these suggestions should affect one text and not the other, but I am actually leaning towards that this is one of those 'it sucks, but learn to live with it'. In my experience, AutoCAD is notorious for not displaying graphics correctly and there is not much to do about it.

I've seen this happen before. It's a known glitch and I've yet to find a fix for it. It'll make the text bolded without it actually being bold. Maybe someone has an answer....

I can't find the options you mentioned. Hooray for cheap LT version. There's no such circle in the bottom right that I can find.

Graphics card is up to date, regen doesn't fix it, and zooming in or out doesn't change it. Like I said, it all looked just fine when I was working in it in 2014 so I'm not surprised you aren't seeing the problem on your end.

If it didn't behave in such a strangely uniform manner I'd write it off the same. I wish I could upload the base file I'm having to work with because it probably holds the key to figuring it out. I mean these are light fixtures. And when I say it behaves uniformly, I mean all the fixtures of one type in one room will be a blurry mess, and all the ones in another will be crisp and clean. And it all copies perfectly. I can trace where I copied certain patterns of lights over and over down a row, and can see all of one row blurry and the other not.

There's too much pattern in it all to write off as a fluke. There's something up. I just can't figure out what it is.

@tzframpton it's not bolded though. The images I posted don't quite do it justice I guess, but it's not bold. It's a fat jagged blurry blob.

hmm... that does sound too strict to be a pure fluke.

So it works fine in 2014 and looks messy in 2011 ? Perhaps some setting that is not availible in 2011? Something that have changed over the years? Not that I can really explain how it would work, but you know...AutoCAD works in mysterious ways.

Here's what I mean about the uniformity. See the green box? You can tell I copied the same top and bottom fixture across in to the other room. All top fixtures are a blob for text, all bottom are not. Blue boxes demonstrate how specific fixtures in specific spaces are having issues while others aren't.

So it works fine in 2014 and looks messy in 2011 ? Perhaps some setting that is not availible in 2011? Something that have changed over the years? Not that I can really explain how it would work, but you know...AutoCAD works in mysterious ways.

Could be. I hope not. This will drive me nuts.

Hopefully someone will have some idea. I'll post an update once I get it back in 2014 later today on whether that causes the issue to vanish. I mean that it opened clean for you Tiger kind of proves it is likely version related. But I vaguely recall this happening in the past and when it got back with me it was blurry in 2014 as well.

I managed to boil it down to 2 A's, and indeed one is fuzzy and the other not (depending on the zoom factor) but another thing I noticed is they both have different insert points ? and the fuzzy one (right in both cases) looks like the fill pattern has gone wierd.

Other than that all the properties match up just fine. Any chance that they were created differently or maybe at some time one of them came in from mirrored text, there must be an explanation somewhere. I even tried creating mtext and exploding, but couldn't reproduce that varying insert point.

That is funny. I have the same position of the blue grip on all the A's - which matches the non-fuzzy one in your image.

wow, thanks a lot for that insight steven-g. I will play with that knowledge some and see if I can't track it down later tonight.

Ok I can reproduce the problem text. Take one of the normal text items and turn it into block, select the block and change the X scale factor to 1.000001 (in my case this is one decimal place beyond what actually shows in the properties - might not be significant but 1.0000001 doesn't work) and then explode the block, now you have a piece of text that shows all the properties the same as the original but is visually different. I have no idea how that could occur by itself, but I can only imagine that your text items at some point in the past were possibly contained in a block and somehow one of them became stretched or scaled in the x axis, or maybe some other handling can cause the same effect. Playing with the width factor of the original text has the same effect but shows up in the properties.

Reproducable in Civil 3D 2015 as well.

Very weird.

And I applaud your tenacity Steven!

I just love puzzles like this

You're the man steven-g. There was one thing that left me stumped after what you figured out in your most recent post. If I copied perfectly happy text and snapped it to a leader that was related to fuzzy text, that good text went fuzzy. Which made no sense if scaling it in X was the culprit.

But your comments on the number 1.0000001 and significant figures clicked. Sure enough, clicked in the z position line of the quick properties, hit 0, and it fixed it.

It showed as z position being 0 already because it just isn't set to show the tiny decimal value off that it was.

Thank you to all of you so much for the help!