Many TrueType fonts are delivered with Windows, and many more are available from various vendors for free or for purchase. TrueType is an industry standard format supported by MicroStation. In general, this is the recommended font type for use in MicroStation. TrueType fonts also include full Unicode support (note: not all TrueType fonts contain characters for all languages). TrueType fonts are always filled, and therefore do not provide good support for "stick" fonts (as opposed to SHX and RSC fonts).

MicroStation searches for TrueType fonts in your Windows system fonts directory (%SYSTEMROOT%\Fonts), in directories specified by MS_FONTPATH, and in the same directory as the design file requesting the font.

When exporting, DWG natively supports TrueType fonts, and no special export is performed. However, AutoCAD does not support MicroStation’s concept of "Vertical" TrueType text (see comments below for recommendations). If you use the vertical flag in MicroStation text and want to export it to DWG, you must use an SHX font (alternately an RSC can be used which will then be converted to SHX on export).

For vertical text in Asian languages, select a vertical font (a font’s whose names begin with "@"), and rotate the text elements by 270°. MicroStation’s "Vertical" text flag simply stacks horizontal characters, and this is not what is normally thought of as vertical text for languages that support it; it is more of a decoration format flag.

If CustomFontCreation is enabled for a given language in the font configuration file, font linking is enabled, which allows Windows to attempt to substitute a fallback font on a character-by-character basis. This is different than font substitution in that even if a font is found, if it does not contain a glyph for a given character, font linking can be used to find an alternate font for use with that specific glyph. This introduces overhead when drawing each text element, and should be avoided unless necessary.

Text using third party TrueType fonts that were not designed using the generally accepted TrueType definition may display differently than in previous releases. Although the current presentation is more accurate, you can make the text using these fonts appear as it did previously by setting the configuration variable MS_80TRUETYPESCALE=1.