Scaleablility

[Vitruvius]

This may have been covered. But...

I have GDL symbols that reference the drawing scale for lineweights and detail. For example, a door place in a drawing will show different levels of detail if the drawing is 1:25, 1:50 or 1:100 - likewise the pen weights will adjust. At 1:25 for large scale residential layouts, you'll get the door handle and door stopper showing whilst at 1:100 the door hardware disappears and the door just becomes a single line with a swing.

Is there any likewise way we could ascribe this kind of pen weight hierarchy to the whole project instead? For example, perhaps Pen 1 is a .25mm pen at 1:50 and a .15mm pen at 1:100.

The thinking is that when your plans are shown at architectural scale (1:25, 1:50 or 1:100) they read right, and when they're at site plan scale (1:250 or above) they benefit from lighter pen weights for more legibility. And when you take off a detail (1:5 etc), it would work likewise.

I thought if it was implemented in the pen matrix table, you could be given three thresholds which you could select - ie at 1:2 your Pen 1 is so thick, at 1:50 it is another thickness, and at 1:100 its another.

Or is this just too goofy?

[Anonymous]

To further make use of this idea - perhaps a pen map linked with views along the lines of display options and such. There are times when it would be nice to change pen maps to lighten or darken pens without the scale changing (ex.- Floor plans = Heavier walls, Structural plans = Lighter walls).

This method may require a way to link multiple pen maps to a project, but by using the pen sets in Archicad, it would save from having to overwrite them in Plotmaker.

[Vitruvius]

Dear Tom,

You can already establish your preferences and import them using Attribute Manager. I name attribute preferences "Site Plan", "Architectural Plan" and so on. That's the proactive approach and I'm looking for the lazy approach!

What I was getting at was essentially the ability to make it a "no brainer" so that when others on the team want to print it always comes out consisently by default. Or myself, when it's late at night and I go to the printer and ... "oops, forgot to change the pen attributes".

Not a huge deal but it would be a nice sychronization with the GDL symbols.

Cheers, Cameron

[Dwight]

Great ideas, but in the meantime, wall pens can be simply suppressed by a white overlay fill:

Create a special layer controlled with layer combinations to drop the intensity of linework without altering it.

[Anonymous]

I think we are looking for the same thing - the elimination of the attribute manager step. By setting the pens specific to the views, plotmaker would then have the correct pen map and the printing would match.

I apologize if I am misunderstanding your request, but the general idea of the multiple configurations of pens (no matter the method) does sound interesting.