Missing SHX files in AutoCAD: ignore it or fix it?

The dialog means AutoCAD cannot find a shape file your drawing asks for.

You open a drawing somebody sent you and a grey box lands in front of it before you see a single line. By the end of this page you will know whether clicking it away is safe, and how to get the reference out of the drawing instead of dismissing the same box every morning.

The window is titled Missing SHX Files and it asks: One or more SHX files are missing. What do you want to do? Autodesk calls SHX files shape files, and they are used as text fonts or symbol fonts. That second job is why this problem is so stubborn.

Nothing is broken. An SHX lives in the AutoCAD program folder or on the server of the office that drew the file. Send the DWG on its own and the SHX stays behind. The person who drew it has never seen this message, because on their machine everything is present.

You can ignore it, and most of the time nothing bad happens.

Straight answer first, because that is what people came for. Yes, ignore it. AutoCAD substitutes a font and writes that to the command line, for example substituting simplex.shx for archquik.shx. Your text is still there, just wearing different clothes.

Two buttons and a tick box. They look equal. They are not, and the tick box is the one people regret.

Watch that third row. Tick it while Specify a replacement for each SHX file is selected and every affected drawing will throw a file browser at you from then on, with no dialog and no explanation in front of it. Undoing it is further down this page.

When nothing is missing on screen, a linetype is holding the reference.

Here is the case that keeps threads alive for years without a proper answer. Among the causes Autodesk lists is this one: a linetype pattern is missing that contains symbols by referencing an SHX shape file. Read that again, because it explains the whole thing.

You lose no letters. You lose the mark inside a line. A gas line loses its G, a survey boundary loses its tick, a cable tray becomes a plain dashed line. Zoomed out, a line still looks like a line, so nothing looks wrong until the sheet is plotted. Usually with a contractor already holding it.

So my working rule is simple: check whether any text is actually missing before you touch anything. If every label is present and the warning still fires on every open, stop looking at text styles. It is a linetype.

Getting rid of the message for good takes PURGE, not a font swap.

This is the route that is barely documented anywhere and the only one that ends the problem. You are not restoring a file, you are deleting the reference to it. Work in a copy.

1. On opening, choose Specify a replacement for each SHX file.
2. Write down the file names shown at the top of the next window.
3. Click Cancel once you reach the last of those windows. The drawing opens anyway.
4. Type PURGE and click Find Non-Purgeable Items.
5. Expand Shapes and click the shape that was reported missing. On the right you see what uses it, typically a linetype name.
6. Move to the Linetypes section in that same window, select the linetype in question and highlight the objects that use it.
7. Delete those objects or assign them a different linetype. Once the old linetype is no longer in use it can be purged, and the SHX reference goes with it.

Save under a new name and reopen. Silence. On big consultant drawings this doubles as a clean-up, and if the file still feels sluggish afterwards the cause is elsewhere, which is covered in the piece on why AutoCAD gets slow or freezes. One courtesy: do not quietly rewrite linetypes in a drawing that goes back to the client. It is their file.

Put the SHX file where AutoCAD actually looks for it.

If you can get the original file, placing it correctly is the whole job. Two locations work almost always: the folder holding the DWG that uses it, and the standard fonts folder of your installation.

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\Fonts

Still getting the warning? Then your installation points somewhere custom, and here is how you find out where.

1. Type OP at the command line to open the Options dialog.
2. On the Files tab, expand Support File Search Path and note the path pointing at fonts. In offices this is often a network drive.
3. Browse to that folder and check whether the SHX is genuinely there. If not, copy it in and restart AutoCAD.
4. If it is there, right-click the folder, open Properties and check whether it is set to Read-Only. Clear that box and grant permission if Windows asks.

Afterwards the font should appear in the Font Name list of the Text Style dialog, which you open with STYLE. A missing font is flagged there with a yellow triangle and an exclamation mark. If none of that helps, drop a copy in these two as well:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\Rxx.x\<language>\Support
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 20xx\UserDataCache\Support

Better still, ask the sender to package the drawing with ETRANSMIT, which bundles the DWG with everything it depends on, fonts included. Autodesk recommends exactly that for drawings created by other people. A missing SHX is a different animal from a missing external reference, by the way; that one is about a whole drawing file going astray and is handled in the guide to fixing an Xref that is not found.

The same dialog turns up in Civil 3D and in free DWG viewers.

This is not an AutoCAD-only message, which surprises people who assume their vertical is doing something odd. Autodesk's own article on not being able to turn the prompt off is written around Civil 3D and AutoCAD products together, and the wording of the dialog is identical.

Civil 3D drawings hit it harder, and the reason is the survey side of the work: point styles, boundary symbols and utility linetypes are exactly the content built on custom shape files, then shared between offices that each have their own set.

If you are only viewing a drawing rather than editing it, in the free DWG viewer for instance, the purge route is closed to you: a viewer does not let you change what is in the file. Your options shrink to placing the SHX where it can be found, or asking for a package. That is a fair reason to open the file in AutoCAD instead when a plot has to be right; if your office is running an expired seat, a current AutoCAD licence is what puts that option back on the table.

Text missing in a layout is usually a different problem entirely.

A lot of people arrive here after searching for text missing in paper space, and I would rather send you to the right place than have you hunt for a font that was never the issue.

Test it in ten seconds. Switch to model space and look for the text there. If it is present in model space and absent through the viewport, no SHX is involved. The two usual suspects are a layer frozen in that particular viewport, and annotative objects whose annotation scale does not match the scale the viewport is set to.

A missing SHX behaves differently. It announces itself on open, it substitutes a font, and it affects the drawing everywhere rather than inside one viewport. That distinction saves a lot of afternoons.

SHX text lands in your PDF as comments, and PDFSHX turns that off.

Different question, same file type, and it is asked nearly as often: you plot to PDF and the result is littered with yellow note icons or duplicated lines of text sitting over the drawing. Older PDF readers make it worse by showing every comment at once.

The reason is short. PDF does not support SHX fonts. AutoCAD therefore draws that text as geometry so it looks right, and stores the readable version separately as comments or hidden text. According to the Autodesk documentation for the PDFSHX system variable, checked on 8 August 2026, the initial value is 1, which creates comments from text objects using SHX fonts; at 0 no additional comments are created and the text is preserved visually as geometric objects. The variable used to be called EPDFSHX, which is why old forum posts disagree with your command line.

PDFSHX
Enter new value for PDFSHX <1>: 0

Know what you are trading away. At 0 that text cannot be selected or searched in the PDF, because it is line work and nothing else. For a sheet going to site, fine. For a PDF where somebody needs to search a room number, not fine at all.

The PDF Options dialog also offers Capture fonts used in the drawing and Convert all text to geometry, and the second goes much further than PDFSHX because it applies to every piece of text including TrueType. Plot styles, sheets and output settings belong in the walkthrough on exporting DWG to PDF; this section is only about the SHX layer. Worth knowing: PDFSHX is stored in the registry, so it is a per-workstation setting. Two colleagues plotting the same DWG can produce different PDFs, and nobody thinks to blame the workstation.

Coming the other way, importing a PDF gives you SHX text as loose geometry, because it was never stored as text. The PDFSHXTEXT command converts selected SHX geometry back into text objects. Autodesk advises selecting small amounts at a time, which is sound: recognition on rotated or twice-converted text is patchy, and for a handful of labels retyping is faster.

Turning the dialog off is easy, and so is turning it back on.

If a file browser appears instantly on every drawing with no dialog in front of it, somebody once ticked the box to remember their choice while specifying a replacement. Autodesk names that as the cause.

1. Type OPTIONS and press Enter.
2. Open the System tab and click Hidden Messages Settings.
3. Reactivate the message for .shx files.
4. Click OK and Apply, close AutoCAD, reopen it and open the drawing that was warning you.
5. Now choose Ignore the missing SHX files and continue and tick Always perform my current choice. From here those drawings open without a word.

That order matters more than it looks. Tick first, read second, and you have simply swapped one annoyance for a quieter one that still costs you linetype symbols.

Still not working? These are the causes that are left.

File in the right place and the warning keeps coming? The list is short:

• The file is there but never appears in the list. The SHX is corrupt or unreadable to AutoCAD. Get a fresh copy; there is nothing to repair.
• The folder is Read-Only. Common under Program Files.
• The search path points at a network drive that is not connected. Working from home, different VPN, same warning.
• Your profile or settings files are damaged. Resetting AutoCAD to defaults fixes what no amount of folder shuffling will.
• The yellow triangle stays in the Text Style dialog even after you picked a replacement. That is expected: AutoCAD keeps the text style control separate from the substitution on your machine.
• Chinese characters in the drawing. For Traditional Chinese check Big Font and use bigfont.shx or chineset.shx; for Simplified Chinese use gbcbig.shx.

The full list of causes and the substitution behaviour sit in the Autodesk support article on missing SHX files, checked on 8 August 2026. If you are still stuck after all that, email us the exact file name from the dialog together with your AutoCAD version; those two details are usually enough to say whether the file can still be found or whether it should come out of the drawing.

What sticks with me after years of opening other people's drawings is not technical at all. The missing file is rarely the real problem. The real problem is that the person who drew it never sees what you see and therefore never changes anything. So add one line to the way you request drawings: send it as an ETRANSMIT package. That single line saves more time than every step above put together.