Pen Standards

[Anonymous]

Just wondering what pen colour standards people are using in their offices for documentation. It is easy to find standard pens using a black background, i guess from autocad, but i cannot find any info on the internet what other people are using for white backgrounds?

[Geoff Briggs]

The US template is the result of a collaboration between Graphisoft (primarily Gabor Kovacs and Tibor Szolnoki) and some US users who's names you would recognize from this forum. The pen table was worked on mostly by Karl Ottenstein, Ransom Radcliff and myself, with Ransom doing most of the heavy lifting as he did throughout the US tempalte and library process. Ransom has been a tireless advocate for the needs of the North American market. As witnessed by the diversity of opinion found here there are many viable approaches to pen management, but many of these (including my own) we felt were too complicated or specialized to qualify as the default in a basic template. We also want to encourage consistency in the use of default pens used by GDL content creators, especially Graphisoft. Within these constrains many trade off are possible so we made some choices:

• We did not see any logic in the AC9 and earlier default pen tables. Many better examples exist.
• We did not like the new INT pen table either.
• We determined to the best of our ability the "sacred" Graphisoft pens. (There is no published list.) The established ones being 1-10 we reserved the rest of the top row for them.
• We decided, based on our own preference, to not establish a color or gradient to line weight correlation. ArchiCAD offers true line weight and we opted for a WYSIWYG approach.
• The basic premise behind the clusters of darker followed by lighter colors is the darker will print near black and the lighter gray when printed grayscale without remaping.
• The bottom row (141-150) represents a full range of basic black pens followed by matching whites that can be used as masking pens.
• The entire lower portion of the table is left blank for user's custom pens. This way a system of dedicate pens can be established while leaving the default pens intact.

Overall we decided that we would not use the template to establish or recommend a pen logic but instead provide a nice range of generic colors and grays that would allow new users a broad range of graphic options without having to learn a complicated system.

Like many here I have created a system of dedicated pens for specific element types that allows global editing and cool layout mapping tricks. After some practise with this system I find I am using these pens (at the bottom of my pen table) almost exclusively. I promote and share this approach with other project teams in our office, but combining it with the default set lets users ease into the practise. The new pen descriptions will help enormously.

It's obvious there is no right or wrong way to use ArchiCAD's pens. All of the approaches presented here have their strengths. Some are complete systems that require a degree of training, others more flexible. The Object Depository (shouldn't that be Repository?) has a place for templates. I encourage you to use it to share your pen schemes with the entire ArchiCAD community.

[PatriciaLe_o]

Hi,
I know this issue must be already solved for you guys, but I'm still deciding how I should manage the pens, specially now, with AC10 pre defined ones.
Let me first explain you my situation, so you wont bite me!
I work in a very small office in Portugal (it's just me, my boss and another architect) and when I came to this office, we migrated from AutoCAD to ArchiCAD. I've never heard of AC before I came here. In Brazil (where I come from!) I think almost no one uses it! Now, a little more than 1 year after, I think I learned it pretty well, by myself, making mistakes and learning with them and reading a lot. As a Virgo person, my boss gave me the task of padronizing everything as much as I could. And so am I, trying to learn with you masters!
Sorry about the long text but the question is about pen colours... From what I thought on AC "what you see is what you get", so I used the first 10 pens as black, from 11 to 14 in shades of gray and with different weights. In the beginning it was pretty hard because I was used to the colour correspondence of weights in autocad, but I got used. And now with the AC10 and the different pen sets, I don't know what to do! I'd prefer to just adopt the AC pens, because I think more experienced people must have thought about it for quite a time... But I still don't understand its logic. Do you print your plans in colour?? Or just use colour to construct and turn to print in black? If so, you can not use colour at all...
Sorry again to talk so much, but I hope you can give me a light!

[Anonymous]

I think everyone constructs their plans in colour, just as you would in AutoCAD. In its simplist form you essentially have 2 pen sets, one for drafting and one for plotting. I think this is the same in AutoCAD? The drafting set has all the pens in colour for easy identification when drafting. When you switch to layouts you then change the pen set to your plotting pen set, this set has all the drafting pens switched to black, this excludes those pens you want to print colour.

For me, the only difference between my drafting and plotting pens sets are the first 10 pens which are colour in the drafting pen set and black in the plotting pen set. All the pen weights remian constant.

Hope that helps.

[PatriciaLe_o]

I used to do everything in colour in AutoCad, wich colour corresponding to a pen weight, but I was convinced that in AC, I should see what would be printed... I'm reviewing my concepts.... again! Thanks Mark.

[Anonymous]

PatriciaLeão wrote:
...but I was convinced that in AC, I should see what would be printed...

Actually i still use black pens when drafting for sketches and masterplans. I have another pen set for this. Like you say it is good to see what is actually going to be printed, especially when doing a presentation document. I switch to coloured drafting pens when i am doing construction documentation and the like.

[__archiben]

Mark wrote:
For me, the only difference between my drafting and plotting pens sets are the first 10 pens which are colour in the drafting pen set and black in the plotting pen set. All the pen weights remian constant.

. . . and then when you take this principle to the next level, different pen colours and weights can be used in multiple pensets to achieve a multitude of graphical effects...

- turn the 'architecture' to a thin grey and boost the electrical/HVAC/plumbing layouts.

- boost the weight of the framing on the framing plans but keep them lightweight and contextual on other, more general, plans.

- hide composite wall linings to show core only by changing them to white.

- represent the same plan differently at different scales (pen weight adjustment)

... to name but a few . . .

the more complex the output requirements, the more complex the penset. take a look at the 'new & reset' default archicad pens. you will notice that the pens are defined by purpose rather than by traditional drafting weights. get used to using the new 'pen description' fields that can be assigned to pens - this shows in all pen choice dialogues to aid you choosing the correct pen for the correct purpose whilst building your model.

HTH
~/archiben

[__archiben]

whilst beta testing AC10 a few of us asked for the penset to made available in the print dialogue - so that an 'output' type penset could be quickly chosen for a particular print.

it wasn't feasible to include this in the AC10 release, but graphisoft (via eric batte) did give us a pretty handy tip for dealing with quick print pensets in the meantime:

simply add the 'Pen Set List' command/action into the 'page setup' toolbar menu.....

~/archiben

[PatriciaLe_o]

Mark wrote:
Actually i still use black pens when drafting for sketches and masterplans. I have another pen set for this.

I guess I wasn't working the best way, only having one pen set (both for modeling and printing). But correct me if I'm wrong again: with the pre set pen sets, that come in AC10, do I still need to have different pen sets for plotting or they're all integrated? I think they already include the ones for plotting... so with the same pen number, I could have different effects.

[Anonymous]

~/archiben wrote:

- hide composite wall linings to show core only by changing them to white.

This is me doing something really stupid for some years, so I would like to share it with you guys

I also used this neat trick to hide the wall,slab,roof innards every time I wanted to output plans and sections with less detail.

Yesterday, I discovered (by accident, as it usually happens) that AC10 lets you fiddle with the innards output, in Documents>Set Model View>Model View Options.

I was in CAD nirvana. Finally we have real scale output control, like those lucky Revit users have! Hah! Take that!

Being a cautious guy (not), I decided to open AC9 before I rushed to post this neat trick.


Surprise. AC9 had it too. I wonder if maybe 8, 7 or even 6 had it.

My guess is there are many guys out there that do not know this, so here I do my penitence in public.
Then again, maybe I was the only guy being really stupid... would not be the first time.

[Geoff Briggs]

Yes Model View Options (formerly Display Options) has enabled the manipulation of composite cavities for as long as I've been using ArchiCAD, and I'm sure a lot longer. Problem is there is no Core Only setting despite a growing chorus of requests for this feature over the years. Graphisoft is well aware of the popularity of this (proposed) setting but for unexplained reasons has yet to deliver. Thus the technique of changing the cladding/sheathing pens to white. This of course requires dedicating pens for these purposes. But as Ben points out, this has many advantages beyond just enabling a core only display. If you look at the pen table screen shot I posted earlier, the entire row beginning with #181 is dedicated to composites, with the black pens at the beginning assigned to the skin separator lines and the pairs of lighter pens that follow to the foreground and background pens of fills. The groups of pens in the area below this are dedicated to various construction element categories like electrical, plumbing, HVAC or materials like stone, wood, brick, depending on the project. I also have certain pens dedicated to annotation, masking, non-printing construction lines, etc. This is very much a work in progress but I'm finding that for most views all pens used are now from my user defined set, which means it's very easy to perform the kind of special effects Ben has enumerated.