not great?? .....Wwell!! Since seeing the file, I see that it's not only not great, but also an inappropriate solution. The text is already made with paths, for some reason. I did a test export and find the exact some problem. Let me see if I can open the PDF with Inkscape. I"ll be interested ...

Is there any reason I wouldn't want to simply select the entire document and convert stroke to path? If that won't have any negative affect on the drawing then that would only take a second. Edit: Ah I see it's processing time. Took about a minute to convert that sample file from stroke to path. Wel...

I'm just adding some numbers by dimensions on the pre-existing drawing. The text which I am having issues with was already on the drawing when I got it.

Here's a sample file. I cut out all of the critical information but there's plenty left to demonstrate the problem.

Also: I converted the Es (or rather the lines forming the top, back, and bottom of the Es) into paths, and that fixed it. However it's really irritating to have to go through and convert every E individually into a path. Is there a better way to do this?

So these are machining drawings made by some kind of machining drawing software. Possibly CAD software. I don't know what the font used is, but Inkscape doesn't recognize it as a font. It seems to think it's just shapes, the middle bar of the E is not part of the same object as the top, back and bot...

I'm using Inkscape to add labeling to features on PDF engineering drawings and while the drawings generally open correctly and save correctly as SVG files, when I attempt to save them as PDFs all of the Es on the drawing get turned into 8s. More accurately all of the Es get a vertical line added to ...