US pens

[arg617]

Does anyone know what the rationale is behind the US pens in Archicad?

I've been working with a template that modifies the pens and have grown frustrated at having to adjust pens every time I use a new object. What is best practice for being thorough but also efficient?

I've been thinking that using the "out of the box" pens might make sense but haven't been able to track down how they are intended to be used. I found this but Graphisoft specifically states, "Note: the available Pen Sets and their parameters can be different in every language version. In this case, this PEN SET theory doesn’t apply to the U.S. version"

Do they describe the pens theory for the US version anywhere?

Thanks for your help.

[Richard Morrison]

Jared Banks (shoegnome.com) has written voluminously about pen sets, most of which is now obsolete due to the introduction of Graphic Overrides. You might take a look at Jared's free template, and see how his pen sets are currently being used. In general, though, if you get your graphic overrides set correctly, you have to pay less attention to pen sets.

[arg617]

Thanks Richard. I've read Jared's posts and it was basically his template that I have been using (modified a bit of course to suit our needs), but I feel like I might not be taking full advantage of pens this way. I also feel like I'm adjusting pens in library objects too often.

Is there no actual documentation of the rationale behind US pens? I might have to stick with the Shoegnome pens if there isn't, but Graphisoft must have this documented somewhere, no?

[Richard Morrison]

arg617 wrote:
Is there no actual documentation of the rationale behind US pens? I might have to stick with the Shoegnome pens if there isn't, but Graphisoft must have this documented somewhere, no?

Rationale? Having seen US Default Pen sets over the past 20 years, as well a number of other systems, I can tell you that the defaults have changed frequently in most respects, EXCEPT for the 1st row, and Pen 91. The logic of the assignments in the first row escapes me, but it seems that pens 1-3 are used in the OOTB wall definitions. The "US ArchiCAD 18 Default" set has pretty complete descriptions for each pen, but nothing to indicate why they were organized this way, and I've never found any documentation. There is no "perfect" pen set, because even if you found that the US defaults showed US library objects consistently and logically, you will be using objects from somewhere else, and then the pens are all wrong. (e.g. Cadimage objects look horrible in the US defaults.) I've come across sets that were organized beautifully, but still had no relation to any standard GS content. So, if you are already using Jared's template, that's as good as any, and probably better than most.

[Karl Ottenstein]

arg617 wrote:
I've been working with a template that modifies the pens and have grown frustrated at having to adjust pens every time I use a new object.

As the article you linked to notes, pens 1-20 are the library part pens. And, the US still expects pen 91 to be white. If you leave those alone, your library parts should come out without requiring major changes. (Disclaimer: I haven't checked recent US libraries to verify that this is still the case. Link had a post somewhere that noted some library parts using a few random pens above 20.)

Pens have been talked about a lot on the forums forever. Pen sets presented a lot of flexibility when they appeared, but graphics overrides present even more control for different drawing types / views. For example, in the 'old' days, we might have picked some pen number to be red to be used for firewalls in certain views - and be black in another pen set that didn't call out firewalls. Now, with graphics overrides, that is unnecessary as we can just override all fire walls. Etc.

Another example: in the old days, I had groups of pens for different types of elements including their background fill, e.g., columns had a group. The purpose then was so that I could make structural columns pop, or otherwise display them in different ways with a different pen set in different drawings. That is now obsolete with Graphic Overrides which let us create an override set to change just the columns that we want to look different for a particular view/drawing - combined with Model View Options. Pen sets can now be extremely simple and still let us generate varied drawings.

Almost everything in the defaults (US or otherwise) is just an example to get people started - not a 'best use' recommendation. Some people duplicate colors at different widths to be assigned by function - using either rows (+1 = next width) or columns (+20 = next width). Most of us have a grayscale ramp in there somewhere. Others don't worry about color and only use a handful of pens of different widths.

Many ways to set up, and thousands (literally) of posts here and on blogs giving examples - although most are from before the Graphic Override introduction, so read with a grain of salt.

A simple scheme wins the day. (And apologies to anyone that I shared my overly-complex pen scheme with in past years!)