need black background for project sales brochure

[Anonymous]

Hi

we've been asked to present our project in a sales brochure, just basic plans, enlarged room plans, certain elevations and details and some photos. No problem as we can layout in Archicad (to scale) PDF and send to printer. But they want it reversed - black background, white/greyscale drawings and colour photos.

can Archicad do this?

i assume the black background will be dependent on the choice paper
i assume that we will have to find and select and change all lines from black (and any other colour) to white + grey, but we need to be able to see what it's gonna look like before we sent it to the printer (outside company)

Q: can the Master layout background colour be changed?
Q: can the plan/section/etc. view's background colour be changed?

Thanks, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Moji

[Rob]

I have had to face the similar scenario just recently. This is what has actually worked best for us:
1. create a master layout with a black fill on it.
2. define a special pen set that will have reverse pen colours (eg. all blacks to whites and grey ones like let's say pen colour R10G10B10 will become R245(255-10)G245(255-10)B245(255-10) etc..) apply it on all layout drawings.

We have created two sets of layouts with white and black masters, then copied drawings from one to another and changed just the pen set of those drawings.

AFAIK there is no automatic inverse print feature in AC. Remember if you change the background to black it will not help you because the background colour is ignored when you print.

[David Maudlin]

Moji:

The background color for Layouts cannot be changed, the background color for plans, sections, details, etc. can be changed via the Grids & Background... command.

To change the pens' colors, you would be better off creating a new pen set with the pens set to white and grey, then assigning this set to the project via the Pens & Colors... command. This pen set could then be moved to other projects using the Attribute Manager... command.

HTH

David

[Anonymous]

Pen sets are the best way if doing it all in Archicad.

We recently achieved this effect by opening a normal black-lines-on-white-background PDF in Photoshop and reversing it there, which worked well as we had other aspects of the presentation done in PS too.

[Anonymous]

hey thanks so much guys - i think you've solved our problems
regards
moji