If you are a regular user of an older version of Altium Designer (AD), you may find some “interesting” problems when running on the latest version of Windows 10.

When recently creating a smart PDF I noted that the reference zone text within the page boundaries of a schematic had suddenly disappeared. Thinking this was odd, I also tried printing to a PDF no dice, worse yet a print preview gave the same result. So where did they go ?

There was little useful help from the Altium website about such issues, other than to say it could be a video card or print driver problem and to delete all drivers and add them back one at a time until you work out which one is causing the problem. Sigh, so not helpful.

Instead it turns out in older versions of AD may use the 32-bit GDI+ interface to render text, this was always going to end badly with the latest 64-bit edition of Windows 10.

Thankfully one can disable this feature within AD by clearing the “Render text using GDI+” checkbox in the following Menu;

DXP > Preferences > Schematic > General > Options

After unchecking, the reference zone characters reappeared in both my SmartPDF and printed copies, woo were back ! I’m filing this here so I can remember what to do the next time I have this problems, I hope that others may find this useful.