AutoCAD fonts

Autodesk developed Big Fonts to extend or replace the regular fonts to include characters for specific countries. When combined with the older SHX fonts it increased the possible number of characters by an order of magnitude to 65535. The older SHX fonts are 7-bit fonts, and the Big Fonts are 8-bit fonts. When you use these fonts, AutoCAD first looks in the Big Font for the character it needs; if it does not find the character, it will then looks in the 7-bit font.

In AutoCAD Release 12 and earlier releases, used only 255 characters.