"Non-Standard" or "unusual" text characters  like exponential factors( like cubed or squared), other mathematical operators or plain symbols, in some industries are a fundamental piece of in the puzzle when annotating drawings, or in product specifications/information in their drawings. So it’s no surprise that if all of the sudden you need one of these symbols, and you don’t find them, you feel tempted to assume that they’re not available, and/or start to panic. Keep calm. There’s a way….. Let’s use a very simple example, that you can use for other than the character mentioned here.

Let’s say that we’re composing a drawing, where you need to create/insert the string of the text 10, with an exponential=7 in a given drawing.

-          You launch the Command _NOTE, Type 10, and go to the Symbol button (because after all, that’s where you can find the Squared and Cubed characters), to "raise" the 7 so it's shown as exponential. Well, you can’t see any option for superscript text, so cleverly, you hit the Option “Others”, to look for the e option in the Character Map. Horror! It’s not there!

If that is the case, it’s likely that the Fonts you have installed don’t have that character(s) available, or they are not available to DraftSight. So what can you do?

If you know that the Fonts you have installed in your machine have the particular character you are looking for, make sure they are accessible to DraftSight.

-          Go to Control Panel > Fonts, and Locate it.

-          Launch DraftSight, and Go To Menu> Tools> Options, and check the Fonts folder paths you have set (as shown below)

-          Copy and paste the Font file to these folders.

You are not sure if the Fonts installed have the character you are looking for? No problem. One Font that has a particularly extensive set of characters available, is the Font “Arial Unicode MS”. If not available, download it from the internet, and install it in your machine, and copy it to the locations mentioned above.

• Once you have done this, Launch DraftSight, and create/edit your text. When in the appropriate place of the text string, Click the Insert Symbol Button, and in the Character Map Font, Select “Arial Unicode MS”.

Select the the exponential 7 character in the character map, Click Copy, and when returning to the Note text Editor/text string, Mouse-Right-Click>Paste.And there you have it.

As I mentioned above, this font has an extensive set of characters that are likely to fit 99% of users or more.If none of the characters available suits your needs, there's plenty of Font files to look for. And also you can also create Private Characters, using the Private Character Editor. To learn more on how to create these, in the Character Map Dialog in DraftSight, Click Help: This will launch the Windows Help in the Topic  “Using special characters (Character Map): frequently asked questions”.