blog.draftsperson.net

the art of technical drawing

blog.draftsperson.net

AutoCAD Text Styles: Setup Guide + Free SHX Fonts

Last updated July 27, 2026

A text style in AutoCAD is a named set of rules for how text looks: which font, what height, how wide, whether it is annotative. Every piece of text in a drawing belongs to one. Get the styles right in your template and you never think about them again; get them wrong and every sheet in the set needs fixing.

This page covers how to set one up, the two settings that cause nearly all the trouble, what to do when a drawing arrives asking for a font you do not have — and then the font downloads, which are further down if that is what you came for.

Creating a text style

The command is STYLE. Autodesk describes it simply as: “Creates, modifies, or specifies text styles.” It opens the Text Style dialog.

  1. Type STYLE and press Enter.
  2. Click New, give the style a name, and click OK. Name it for its job — NOTES-2.5, TITLE, DIMS — not for its font. You may change the font later; you will not want to rename the style.
  3. Pick the Font Name. SHX fonts and TrueType fonts both appear in the list.
  4. Set the Height. Leave it at 0 unless you have a specific reason not to — see below.
  5. Tick Annotative if your office works that way.
  6. Click Apply, then Set Current if you want to start using it now.

Styles live in the drawing they were made in. That is why they belong in your template — set them up once in the DWT and every new drawing starts with the right ones.

The height trap

This is the setting that catches people. Autodesk’s wording:

Sets the text height based on the value you enter. Entering a height greater than 0.0 sets the text height for this style automatically. If you enter 0.0, the text height defaults to the last text height used, or the value stored in the drawing template file.

In plain terms: enter a height and the style is locked to it. Every command that places text with that style will use it and will never ask you. Leave it at 0 and AutoCAD prompts for a height each time.

A fixed height sounds tidy, and for a title block or a sheet-name style it is exactly right. The trouble starts when you want the same font at two sizes: you cannot, from one style. You end up with NOTES-2.5 and NOTES-3.5 and NOTES-5, all identical apart from one number, and then someone edits one of them.

Autodesk records a related consequence: “TEXTSIZE has no effect if the current text style has a fixed height.” So if you are setting TEXTSIZE and nothing is happening, the style has a height baked into it.

There is a second reason to care. A fixed height overrides what dimension styles and multileaders try to do with text. If your dimension text is coming out the wrong size no matter what you set in DIMSTYLE, check whether its text style has a height baked into it. That is usually the culprit.

Annotative styles

Autodesk’s definition:

Specifies that the text is annotative. Annotative objects and styles are used to control the size and scale at which annotation objects are displayed in model space or a layout.

The practical difference is what the height number means. On an ordinary style, the height is measured in drawing units — so text on a 1:100 plan has to be drawn 100 times bigger than you want it to plot, and you do that arithmetic yourself for every scale on the job.

On an annotative style the field is labelled Paper Text Height, and it means the size you want on the printed sheet. Set 2.5 and you get 2.5 mm on paper. AutoCAD does the scaling from the annotation scale of the viewport, and one piece of text can carry several scales at once — the same note reading correctly in a 1:100 viewport and a 1:20 detail beside it.

Ticking Annotative also enables Match Text Orientation to Layout, which Autodesk describes as: “Specifies that the orientation of the text in paper space viewports matches the orientation of the layout. This option is unavailable if the Annotative option is cleared.” Useful when a viewport is twisted — the text stays the right way up on the sheet.

The trap worth knowing before it costs you an afternoon. An annotative object carries a list of the scales it has been given. If it has no representation matching a viewport’s annotation scale, it is simply not shown in that viewport. Text that “disappeared” when someone changed a viewport scale has almost always done this — it is still there, it just has nothing to display at that scale. Right-click the object and use Annotative Object Scale to add the scale you need.

Whether you use annotative styles is an office decision, not a right-or-wrong one. Plenty of very good drawing offices still work at scale factors. What matters is that everyone on the job does the same thing.

The other fields

  • Width Factor — “Sets the character spacing. Entering a value less than 1.0 condenses the text. Entering a value greater than 1.0 expands it.” Handy for squeezing a long note into a column. Below about 0.8 it starts to look squashed.
  • Oblique Angle — “Sets the obliquing angle of the text. Entering a value between -85 and 85 italicizes the text.” The traditional use is 15° for a leaning style.
  • Effects — Upside Down, Backwards and Vertical. Vertical has its uses on sections; the other two almost never do.
  • Use Big Font — “Specifies an Asian-language Big Font file. Only SHX files are valid file types for creating Big Fonts.” Note the restriction: Big Fonts are an SHX-only feature.

SHX or TrueType?

SHX files are AutoCAD’s own format. Autodesk calls them shape files, and they are “used as text fonts or symbol fonts”. They are single-stroke: the characters are drawn as lines rather than filled outlines, which is exactly what a pen plotter wanted and what still reads best on a drawing.

TrueType fonts are the ones Windows uses. They fill solid, they can be bold, and they will happily make a drawing look like a brochure. Two documented differences are worth knowing: Autodesk notes that “TrueType fonts might be displayed at a smaller height than SHX fonts with the same height setting”, so swapping a style from SHX to TrueType can quietly change how the text sits; and “Vertical orientation is not available for TrueType fonts” — the Vertical effect is SHX-only.

They also bring a problem SHX does not: everyone has Arial, so nobody notices the drawing depends on it — until it opens somewhere that does not.

For engineering drawings, the single-stroke SHX fonts remain the safe choice, and the ISO ones below are the conventional starting point.

“One or more SHX files are missing”

Which brings us to the reason most people go looking for fonts in the first place. You open someone else’s drawing and get this:

One or more SHX files are missing. What do you want to do?

SHX files, called shape files, are used as text fonts or symbol fonts. The missing SHX files were not transferred with the drawing, or they were moved, renamed, or deleted.

AutoCAD carries on and substitutes something, reporting it on the command line — Autodesk’s own example is “substituting simplex.shx for archquik.shx”. The drawing opens, the text is all still there, and it is all subtly the wrong shape. Sometimes it is worse than subtle: “the text in the drawing may disappear or display incorrectly”.

Read the command line. That message names the font you need, and that name is what you are looking for in the list below.

Where to put the font once you have it

Autodesk gives two locations that work:

  • “The same folder as the DWG file that uses it.” — the quick fix, and the one to use when the font belongs to one job rather than your whole office.
  • “The standard SHX fonts folder. For Windows this is C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\Fonts.”

Restart AutoCAD afterwards. If the message still appears, your office may have a custom path: type OP, go to the Files tab, and expand Support File Search Path to see where AutoCAD is actually looking. Check the font is in one of those folders, and that the folder is not set to read-only.

The fix that stops it happening again

Chasing fonts one at a time is a waste of an afternoon. Autodesk’s own advice for drawings from other people:

If the file has been received from a third party, ask to have it saved using ETRANSMIT. The font will be packed together with the drawing file.

ETRANSMIT bundles the drawing with everything it depends on — fonts, xrefs, images, plot styles. Use it yourself when you issue drawings and you stop being the person other people have to chase.

One caveat Autodesk attaches to that, and it applies to the downloads below as much as to anything you send: recipients “might require a license before they can legally use them”. Most of the fonts below are long-circulated CAD fonts, but if you are shipping a commercial typeface with a drawing, check the licence.

Choosing what gets substituted

You can decide in advance what AutoCAD falls back to. Autodesk: “If your drawing specifies a font that is not currently on your system, the font designated as your alternate font is automatically substituted. By default, the simplex.shx file is used. If you want to specify a different font, enter the alternate font file name by changing the FONTALT system variable.”

There is also a font mapping file, set by the FONTMAP system variable and defaulting to acad.fmp (acadlt.fmp in LT) — “a list of text fonts and their substitutes” — which lets you map particular missing fonts to particular replacements rather than sending everything to one fallback. For an SHX font, Autodesk documents the order as: the font mapping table first, then the font defined in the text style, then FONTALT, and only then does it ask you.

One more cause worth knowing, because it sends people hunting for a text font that was never the problem: a linetype containing embedded symbols references an SHX shape file too. A missing SHX warning on a drawing whose text is all fine is usually a linetype.

The font downloads

These are the text styles and fonts collected over years of working in CAD, kept here because they are the ones that keep turning up in other people’s drawings. There are bigger collections on the internet — some claim thousands of files — but a pack of four thousand fonts does not help you when what you actually need is the one font named on the command line. These are grouped so you can find that one.

To install: drop the .shx file into your AutoCAD Fonts folder, or into the same folder as the drawing that needs it, then restart AutoCAD. Unzip the packs first. You may need to right-click and choose “Save Link As”.

ISO lettering fonts (6)

The ISO 3098-style single-stroke fonts. isocp and isoct are the usual starting points for engineering drawings – CP is the proportional cut, CT the constant-width one. If you want the proper ISO 3098-B lettering there is a separate post on the ISO3098B font with more detail.

Architectural and hand-lettered fonts (8)

The hand-printed look for architectural sheets. Use these with care on a set that also carries engineering details – mixing a hand font and an ISO font on the same drawing looks like an accident.

The AutoCAD classics (12)

The fonts AutoCAD has shipped with for decades. txt.shx is the default and the fastest to regenerate; simplex.shx is the one AutoCAD falls back to when a font is missing, which is why it is worth having. The Roman and Italic families are the heavier multi-stroke cuts.

Symbol and specialist fonts (12)

Not lettering – these carry symbols. syastro, symap, symath and symusic are symbol sets; gbcbig is a Big Font, which is the Asian-language font type the Text Style dialog handles separately.

Font packs (ZIP) (55)

Collections gathered over the years. Unzip before installing – AutoCAD will not read an SHX inside a ZIP.

Related on this site

The ISO3098B font for AutoCAD covers the proper ISO 3098-B lettering in more detail. How to install a font in AutoCAD takes the installation step on its own. And text heights in drawings covers what size the lettering should actually be once the style is set up.

References

  1. STYLE (Command) — Autodesk AutoCAD Help. “Creates, modifies, or specifies text styles.”
  2. Text Style Dialog Box — Autodesk AutoCAD Help. The Height, Annotative, Match Text Orientation to Layout, Width Factor, Oblique Angle and Use Big Font wording quoted above.
  3. “One or more SHX files are missing. What do you want to do?” when opening a drawing in AutoCAD Products — Autodesk Support, 17 November 2025. What SHX files are, the substitution behaviour, where to place the font, the Support File Search Path check, the ETRANSMIT advice, and linetypes as a cause.
  4. About Substitute Fonts — Autodesk AutoCAD 2026 Help. FONTALT, the simplex.shx default, the font mapping file, and the substitution order for SHX and TTF.
  5. FONTALT (System Variable) — Autodesk AutoCAD Help.