Pen & Colours

[Anonymous]

Hey guys!

I always draw in black and white in Archicad. However it is very tidious work to always change each object's line colours to black.

So I modified my own penset, where each colour is either black or white. The problem is that most objects have different standard colour, so now sometimes when I place for eg. a stair, the fill is black. Is there a downloadable penset for black and white drawing, or do I have to find the right colours by experimenting and then change them to black?

Thank you in advance!

[Erwin Edel]

Pretty sure ArchiCAD should come shipped with some standard templates, just start a new pln based on a standard template and that should give you correct pensets to work with the object library. Save this file and you can import the pensets with Attribute Manager.

I could share the dutch standard pensets, but I doubt they will work with your library.

[Anonymous]

It does come with standard templates. However the templates are colourful. When I put down for eg. a chair its standard colour is green. There is a monochrome penset, but by using it some objects are grey. I would like everything to be black lines.

[Erwin Edel]

Coloured pensets are just for the working view, you use the monochrome ones for the drawings you place on layouts.

The colours clue you in on penweights.

[Anonymous]

First of all thank you for answering!

I would like to have all the lines black in my working view as well. The colourful plan hinders me in my work or during consultations.

[Erwin Edel]

Use the black pensets and just change the settings in the objects as needed then

You can switch pensets on the fly with the quick options palette, by the way

I suppose I'm just part of the dinosaurs who used the coloured lines on 2d CAD with black backgrounds

We have the first 10 pens set for line weights in the dutch template, the colours just tell me if it's right weight for each element in a glance. I really like it, if I want to have a look at print settings, I just swap pensets with quick options or tab to the layoutbook.

[Anonymous]

These are my pensets.
It is a lot of work to go through each object that I've placed and change its colour. There must be an easier way.

[Michael Reed]

Hi, We had this issue to start with, but also had the option on our printers and settings to simply print in "black and white". Mike

[Laszlo Nagy]

I believe the answer is detailed in the ArchiCAD Online Help:

http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/guides/archicad-18-int-reference-guide/configuration/attributes/pen...

http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com/tips/pen-sets/

But basically what it boils down to is that you can set all your Pens to Black except those that are used by elements for Background or Fill Background.
According to the above articles, these are:

Pens 19, 39, 59, 79, 99, 119, 139 plus
Pens 121 to 137.

In the Pen Sets Dialog you can see in the Description field of these Pens that they are all used for background or fill background.

One additional note is that in earlier ArchiCAD versions Pen 91 was the standard Fill Background Color for all Objects (it is now Pen 19). So you may have to set Pen 91 to White as well.

Let us know how it works.

[Steve Jepson]

There are as many pen sets as there area ArchiCAD users. All made for different reasons. Mine of course are genius.