Printing questions

[rgarand]

Hello all,

How do you all handle grey tones when you want your colored lines to print "true black". I know you can select the all to black option...but then the grey toning prints as black, this is not the effect I am looking for. I would like to print all of my lines as "true black" and my greytoned fills as...well greytones. I guess my problem is this. some of the colored we use do not print true black. for example. We us a nice thick,.9mm, magenta line on our border. This same thick line prints out 50% grey and is not so heavy any more. I know we can change the color to black...but this is unexceptable when I am drawing. I like the option of showing a certain color on the screen.

Does anyone know what I am trying to get across here?

[__archiben]

this is where plotmaker comes in . . .

draw as you want to in archiCAD - set the pens/thicknesses as you like to draw and see them on screen (establishing some kind of office convention for this would be handy so that people can move from project to project and not have to re-learn a pen set).

then, in plotmaker, after you have imported the drawing, select it and go to Options->Drawing Pens & Colours. here you can amend the output attributes of all of your pens. this won't affect how they appear in archiCAD - just plotmaker and plotmaker's output.

if you are using 8.1/3.1 be sure to select the drawing and in Edit->Drawing Settings change the 'attribute update rules' to ensure that archiCAD won't overwrite your plotmaker pens the next time the drawing is updated.

if you have established a pen set in archiCAD that you use for all of your drawings, i.e. the pens that you use for greyscale are the same pen numbers on all jobs, you can create a plotmaker template file that uses a uniform pen set throughout the whole layout book, overwriting the pen sets imported from archiCAD.

i have not done this myself, but i would think that it is a combination of editing the 'Book Pens & Colours' (Options->Book Pens & Colours with nothing selected in the layout window), and setting the 'Drawing Attributes' preferences (Plotmaker->Preferences then click through to 'Drawing Attributes') to "Uniform Pens & Colours for Drawings and Book". again i would think that you have to ensure that your 'attribute update rules' are set so that archiCAD doesn't overwrite them on future imports. having seen matthew lohden speak at this years archiCAD university, i think that he's probably the man to ask about this! matthew?

also - be sure to have 'greyscale' or 'colour' selected in the books output settings (Book->Book Settings), or they'll all come out true black anyway!

hth
~/archiben

[rgarand]

Thanks Ben, That is just what I wanted to hear!

[Anonymous]

I prefer (and recommend) setting the pens for each imported drawing individually. Now that we can see the actual drawing pens on the layouts there is little risk of forgetting to change a drawing.

Setting the pens by the drawing allows the inclusion of other drawings based on different standards (e.g. DWGs, etc.) and also allows fine tuning for special cases. A good example is a small hidden line perspective rendering. The standard ArchiCAD pen settings I use are much to heavy for this, so I have special pen settings to lighten the line weights appropriately.

I typically change pens 1 through 80 to black in PM leaving the rest for use as colors and grays. This makes it a snap to do manually (and there is alway the command+option/control+alt click for speed). For special pen settings (like the perspective set above) I have a Master sheet with drawings preset to for various functions to tranfer as needed.