Template default pens and colours

[KeesW]

I must again complain about the complexity of default pens and colours in the Australian, and perhaps other, templates. What genius dreamt up so many combinations and how are users supposed to remember them? Do they even make sense?

Let’s look at text options. We have 'Annotation-general' and 'Annotation-text'. They have different line colours and thicknesses. 'Annotation text general' differs from 'Annotation -general'. In this section, text uses 0.35mm whilst headings are 0.25 mm lines. Sorry for being a bit thick for thinking that convention has thicker lines for headings as for standard text. Dimension lines are only 0.13mm.

We have subtle differences between cut structural (0.20) and cut non-structural (0.18) elements. These are the same colour and I doubt if anyone can see the differences between them on a drawing or on a screen. So why do it? Is the template the outcome of a PhD thesis or designed for practical use?

So why don't I change it? Because pens and colour choice should be interrelated with materials, surfaces and object appearances. As Archicad becomes more complex, reconstructing these connections becomes more time-consuming and only academics, or those in large practices with enough spare time, can sustain this overhead expense.

Subtle variations and academic distinctions do not make for sensible and memorable rules. The KISS principle has clearly by-passed the author of our templates. There is much more than can, and should, be said about our templates and I look forward to hearing views from other users.

PS: Archicad-talk may have added an emoticon without my approval. Please ignore it.

[KeesW]

2.5 weeks and still no defenders of the complex templates foisted on us.
Surely someone out there likes them?

[Erwin Edel]

I like the Dutch template, which as far as I can tell does not use the overly complex system of pens international template (and other local templates) have.

Pen 1-10 are black pens when printed with your typical pen weights going from thin to thick. They have easy to distinguish CAD-colours in the set you'd typically use when drafting, so you know when you see a red line, it is the 0,18 mm etc.
21-30 is the same pen weights, but at excactly 50% grey. Great for furniture outlines (not used by default for that sadly), subdued vectorial fills, distinguishing existing structure from to be built
41-50 again same weights, but red. great for MEP / fire safety / etc
61-70 same weights, green great for: see red
81-90 same weights, blue great for: see red
101-110, black pens for cut fills at different weights / uses (can be tweaked to quickly change if wanted). I don't really use a lot of these, mostly stick to what the template offers for the building materials. I like the hairline one for clear drawings when printed
91-100 white to near black grey scale, 91 is the default backgroup pen for everything in the library, great for solid hatch fills in elevations (dark grey for glass, etc)

Everything else is just assorted colours you can use for illustration purposes, the only exception being pen 19, which is probably popular in other library parts as background pen.

I find it easy to use, like the 5 colour options with weights that are above eachother in the pick a pen dialogue and it is easy to remember pen '1' is 0,13 mm pen, so is '21', '41' etc

[JaseBee]

Having never really been taught traditional CAD drafting practices I've always struggled with the old pen weights/colours problem.

But a few years ago I decided to group things by elements into columns and have types of pens in rows... then graphisoft bought out their idea of how it should be done, so I kind of hybrid-ed their formatting and mine together as it was surprisingly similar.

Unfortunately this was prior to the GO options, but as we haven't upgraded to 20 yet so it still remains useful. However with my limited experience on 20 it seems that GO's are more of a blanket override, so wouldn't perhaps be as suited to objects or other elements that require some nuance between pens for correct display.

In anywise I think I'll keep the pen table I've developed, also made a handy table object to display what each of the pens are (shown attached), unfortunately GDL can't give me a numeric readout of the thicknesses...