Terribly frustrated with Visio 2003's regression in font support..

[michelangelo]

i am a web/multimedia consultant and choose to work on a PC and use Visio for
my work. i have loved and recommended visio to many and have switched from
using programs like Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand to make good
looking flow charts and wire frames to using Visio. it's great.

However, i recently removed my old version of vvisio and installed the new
trial version of Visio 2003. What a HUGE dissapointment. Mainly, what really
ruins it for me, and really adversely affects my workflow is the sudden
regretion of font support.

I simply do not understand this. How can a product that fully supported Type
1, TrueType, OpenType and all those fonts installed by Extensis Suitcase
(almost everyone in my field has Suitcase installed) now NOT support all
these formats?

As a usability and interface designer, it is appauling for such a big comany
with as many resources to make mistakes like this that basically make my job
WAY HARDER.

sorry to be so negative, but in an udustry like mine where so many people
use Macintosh;s, i really push and support Windows XP, Office, and all the
associated tools. Yet when i installed Visio and saw the huge blunder in font
support, and realized another 2 hours of less sleep will happen for me as a
result of it, well, it doesn't reflect well on your paltform or products.

i am a loyal customer of yours, but please, PLEASE, fix these glaring
ommisions in the product.

 

[Mark Nelson [MS]]

Unfortunately Visio is not in direct control of its font support. We rely
on the GDI+ rendering technology provided by the operating system. While
GDI+ is the newest rendering technology with many great benefits, it turns
out to be less capable in terms of support for OpenType fonts. We are
negotiating with the Windows group to improve their font support in the
future.

 

[Gary Mullin, The Symbol Sez!]

I have some custom fonts which I can use with any other Windows product,
but Visio! When I use Insert|Symbol Dialog, it will insert the ASCI
character,
"A", instead of the symbol that I had created for that character position in
the
True Type Font. When you select the character, the menu/font toolbar displays
a "blank". This is in WindowsXP w/Office 2003, and all of the programs
(Excel, Puplisher, Power Point, Word, Access) recognize the font.

Very disappointing, very . . .
Gary Mullin, The Symbol Sez! Consulting Services

 

[Paddy]

:

Unfortunately Visio is not in direct control of its font support. We rely
on the GDI+ rendering technology provided by the operating system. While
GDI+ is the newest rendering technology with many great benefits, it turns
out to be less capable in terms of support for OpenType fonts. We are
negotiating with the Windows group to improve their font support in the
future.

--

This may well explain a weird phenomenon I encountered with Visio 2000
running on Win XP Prof: a drawing with text Symbol font character (theta,
pi, phi etc) - if saved as a graphic file (gif, jpg etc), would not render
the symbol font character, leaving a blank. Yet Visio 2002 on Win 98 would
render the symbol characters perfectly.

Visio 2002 seems to be OK in this regard (but not in other "features" -
grrrrrr!).

Pemo