Lost My Ribbons

I am not too sure of this AutoCAD yet. It seems Autodesk has taken so many privileges with poorly chosen default settings, quirky UI behavior, unwarranted crashing, and odd screen refreshing and behavior. Anyway, I digress, I lost my ribbon bar when I had shut down and reopened AutoCAD. Why? Who knows. Anyway, I tried a few things but finally found my answer. It may not work for everyone, but typing in RIBBON at the commandline brought it back. Back to work.

Newly Inserted Items are Faded

What gives? A user created a block and it came in with faded colors. He then copied a block and it had faded colors. Hmmm.. When I listed the layers and the objects all seemed fine but it still looked faded. It was not in an edit mode of any sort. I researched and found what I thought was an unrelated variable LAYLOCKFADECTL which controlled the visualization of objects on locked layers (not the case here). When we set this variable to 0, we got our blocks back to vibrant colors again. Oh well, fading is gone, bewilderment still here.

When the ISOCP font is too big

We are completing an upgrade from Mechanical 2006 to Mechanical 2009 (I know, we are a little behind the times) but when we opened drawings, the ISOCP font looked like ROMANS and grew outside the leader notes and Block references. We have the Style STANDARD defined as ISOCP.shx but it would not appear correctly. I found a fix. In the OPTIONS, under the FILES tab, expand the TEXT EDITOR, DICTIONARY, AND FONT FILE NAMES, and then set the ALTERNATE FONT FILE to ".". Shut down AutoCAD and then restart. Your ISOCP should appear correct.