Global background pen

[SeaGeoff]

Hi,
I've made a break line object with a masking polygon. I thought I was so clever by using GLOB_DRAWING_BGD_PEN as the pen setting for the mask. And it works great in ArchiCAD, the mask is completely invisible. Problem is if the drawing background is set to anything other than white in AC then the mask shows up in PlotMaker as a solid colored polygon. Now of course I could set the mask fill to white or use a dedicated pen and change that in PM. But I'm wondering if there is another way to achieve my original goal of an invisible mask in AC and PM while still allowing an off-white drawing background. I'm also curious if this behavior has changed in AC9. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

This is not much help for what you want, but a big part of the reason I use an off-white background is so I can see the mask fills.

[Aussie John]

you can use -1 as the background fill number to match the screen color and masks out in plotmaker

[SeaGeoff]

I use an off white fill too Matthew. I just don’t like seeing big white masks. So I set my part to use GLOB_DRAWING_BGD_PEN and all is well in AC but not in PM.

Aussie wrote:
you can use -1 as the background fill number to match the screen color and masks out in plotmaker

Have you tried using -1 in an object parameter? It returns an error on me. They only like positive numbers. Maybe this has been fixed in 9.

[Aussie John]

using poly2_B seems to work

example:poly2_B 5,2,91,-1,
0,0,1,
wid+circ/5+circ,0,1,
wid+circ/5+circ,height5+4*(l_space),1,
0,height5+4*(l_space),1,
0,0,1

[SeaGeoff]

I stand corrected. -1 works fine whether used directly in the script or from a parameter. My errors came because I had passed the same value to a PEN function.

Thanks John.