editing pen colors

[Anonymous]

Hi. I'm pretty new to ArchiCAD, and am trying to switch over from almost 20 years of AutoCAD. I'm trying to set up a plumbing sheet, and I'd like to change the pen setting of my toilet so that it can be displayed "black" while the rest of the building information (walls, etc) are grey. The built-in Electrical Plan penset seems to be close to what I want, so I copied it, renamed it, and figured I'd make a penset custom for plumbing plans. The ArchiCAD Reference Guide on page 183 suggests I use pen 115 for mechanical stuff, so I changed the toilet objects pen to 115.

But now I can't get a penset to accept a new color for a pen.
Document > Pen Sets > Pens & Colors gets me to something that looks like the right place, but when I pick a color with the "Edit Color" button, the whole window just blips and disappears, without applying the change. Oddly, it WILL let me change pen width this way. Anyone have some insight?

Thanks.
-jim (Archicad 14)

[Karl Ottenstein]

jfanjoy wrote:
But now I can't get a penset to accept a new color for a pen.
Document > Pen Sets > Pens & Colors gets me to something that looks like the right place, but when I pick a color with the "Edit Color" button, the whole window just blips and disappears, without applying the change. Oddly, it WILL let me change pen width this way. Anyone have some insight?

You're on the right path, Jim. There is no reason to use 115, just something that will be your own standard for plumbing parts. The US library already uses pen 4 for most plumbing contours, so possibly changing just that pen in a special plumbing set that has everything else gray might work - but pen 4 is used by a bunch of other lib parts too. So, you might have to reassign as you've done.

A shortcut for 'edit color' is to just double click on a color square. Note that you can select as many pens as you want and edit them all at once. After the changes are made, you will see a pen set called "Custom" in your list of pens sets ... you'll need to select it and choose the "Store as..." button to save it with a new name, or replace an existing pen set.

No problem getting the color picker to appear on my Mac, or to change the color of any pen for me. Something might be wrong with your AC installation.

Karl