Yes, the default pen sets delivered with 13 (and 11 and 12) for US users are pretty pitiful. As far as I know, the deficiencies in the US default template and default attributes are due to Graphisoft US not wanting to spend funds to customize the US user experience. (When the economy was OK, that meant that consultants like me got hired by some firms to explain different methods of managing pen sets, etc. for a custom template for that firm.)
The available US pen sets do not do much of anything intelligent with regards to pen assignment, weight, etc in a way to generate different entity line 'pop' for different kinds of drawings.
I should note that many of us AC-nerds strongly advise keeping both pens 91 and 19 as white so that library parts from both the US library and international libraries will (sort of) work.
There was a loss in translation when AC 10 was introduced and the international library parts moved to use pen 19 as white. We US users pointed out that projects are often moved forward from one version to the next with library parts from the current, and previous libraries in use. Thus, if GS wanted pen 19 to be white, we needed pen 91 to remain white. The intent was that the US pen table would support both old and new parts, but GS misunderstood and kept the US parts using an older pen scheme and the INT (and other) parts using a different scheme. It is just one of many messes in the libraries. They also promised us a tool for AC 10 that would let us change default pen assignments en-mass for an entire library (via the XML library tool) - and that was never delivered.
Anyway...
Yeah, the wiki should get an article on the US pens...but I doubt that anyone understands any of those default US pen sets as, frankly, none really make sense for practice IMHO.
Do note that the US library uses pens 1-10 for specific functions - window/door frames, window glass, etc. So, altering them by color or weight will affect the default appearance of most library parts. So, in particular, don't use pen 1 as your 'black' or 'wall' pen ... because it is a default lib part pen as well.
For more years than I can remember, we have pressed Graphisoft to show pen weight in the tables in mm by default, explaining that even though we use Imperial for measurement, including points for fonts, that we do not use points to measure line width. That, along with all other pen related issues has remained on a back burner in a dark room somewhere in a basement in Budapest that somebody lost the key to.
😉
Cheers,
Karl
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier • macOS Sequoia 15.2, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
