EnSight draws all of its text in the graphics window using TrueType fonts. It is capable of reading and drawing most TrueType fonts and font collections. Under Windows, it is also capable of rendering internationalized multi-byte text in annotations, provided an appropriate font containing the necessary glyphs is selected.

To ensure portability between platforms, EnSight includes a collection of cross-platform fonts embedded into EnSight. These include the typefaces: Arial, Courier New, Symbol, and Times New Roman. If you restrict font usage to these font families, resulting .els and other files will be portable. If other font families are used, EnSight may substitute one of these (or other) fonts if it cannot find a match on the target system. EnSight will also read the installed system fonts on Windows and Power PC-based Macs. The environmental variable CEI_FONTPATH may be set to a list of ': ' ('; ' on Windows) separated directory names in which EnSight should also look for .ttf and .ttc files. This allows the user to use their own fonts in EnSight on any platform.

Fonts are always specified in EnSight as a family name and an optional style with a ': ' separator. For example, 'Arial:BoldItalic ' specifies the Arial family with the styles Bold and Italic applied. Style names of 'Roman', 'Italic', 'Bold' and 'Oblique' (and combinations) are all recognized by EnSight and are mapped against the internal flags in the TrueType files themselves. The default fonts, styles and sizes used by EnSight can also be set through a collection of environmental variables:

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_SYMBOL

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_OUTLINE

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_ANNOT

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_SYMBOL_STYLE

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_OUTLINE_STYLE

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_ANNOT_STYLE

ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_OUTLINE_SCALE

The ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_*_STYLE environmental variables use a numbering scheme for the styles. The following values may be added together to form the style:

BOLD 1

ITALIC 2

OBLIQUE 4

ROMAN 8

For example, if you wanted annotations to default to Arial:BoldItalic, the following environmental variables should be set (Windows syntax):

set ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_ANNOT=Arial

set ENSIGHT_FONT_DEFAULT_ANNOT_STYLE=3

This selects Arial and BOLD+ITALIC=3. The default font is not recorded in scenario files. Therefore, if a scenario file is generated with these defaults, for the EnVision user to see the exact same annotations, they would need to set the same environmental variables and have the same fonts installed on their system. Font changes made with the <fo=> formatting codes (see below) are embedded into the scenario files and do not require the environmental variable changes for proper display (but do require the same fonts be installed).