Black to White Pen styles

[therock005]

Generally and due to the nature of my work i mostly print greyscale or BW so i dont really care about color information inside my drawing. Lately though there have been instances where i needed to print color. I use Autocad in the Black/Dark Blue Background and colors appear vastly different when theyre printed in their natural white paper (either sheet-printed or pdf file output).

 

Is there any rule of thumb on how to translate-convert colours so the dark Autocad BG to white output result is normalised.

 

Like the most obvious example being yellow, which is fine and a nice constrast on black, but when appearing on white it feels almost transparent

[SLW210]

You can create a new plot style (or edit an existing) to plot any drawing color any other color.

Because I tend to fix drawings as I go, I just change them in the layer manager to a different color. There may be some LISPs around or you could run a Script on the drawings.

[therock005]

Of course you can do that. I'm just asking if there are any sets readily available that already address this. So as not to sit and start thinking which color should replace which for this conversion to work

[ammobake]

If I take your question correctly, you are wondering if there is some kind of color correction feature where when the colors print to a white background the lighter colors print a darker color for higher contrast, correct?  Short of a custom CTB just for color prints, not that I know of unless theres a LISP for this.

 

But a CTB for color prints is usually going to be needed in the future at some point. So it's usually a good to have it on-hand.

If your colors are too light you could experiment with a CTB that prints those same colors only slightly darker.  Yellow is one I usually avoid for color prints.  There's a couple others. 

 

In the past, I've used color prints for a couple different things - namely flooring plans where each flooring type had a different hatch pattern and color.  Or in-slab heating where I would assign a separate color for each individual loop in the system.

 

But how I would do this is just print using no CTB.

I would just experiment with the colors, occasionally printing to 11x17 to check readability.

I would usually use darker colors like blue, red, purple, dark green, orange, dark grey,  etc.

 

If your colors aren't printing like you want there are other tricks.

Like if you are printing a red hatch and it shows up looking like a solid pink, Just manually change the lineweight of the hatch to be thicker until you get the desired result - which can be done all at once in properties.

 

This or edit the CTB to print your colors with a thicker pen weight at your drawing scale.

 

ChriS

 

[BIGAL]

Our color ctb has the 1st9 as black with various increasing thickness like old iso pens. The last few are greys as is, we have left the color as they are but just sort of know what works, all the colours are set to the same line weight 0.25. Yellow is the worst on white as mentioned, use 32 a nice Orange, some of the blues come out purplyish. Is that a word ?

 

I have attached a sample we have around 5 different ctb's depending on the out put type fine for smll sheets a bit fatter for large sheets. Oh yeah the mono ctb you use the shift and drag over the pen settings to change colour lineweight etc dont do 1 at a time.

 

 

DesignLaserCOLOUR.ctb

[therock005]

On 6/26/2019 at 10:36 AM, BIGAL said:

Our color ctb has the 1st9 as black with various increasing thickness like old iso pens. The last few are greys as is, we have left the color as they are but just sort of know what works, all the colours are set to the same line weight 0.25. Yellow is the worst on white as mentioned, use 32 a nice Orange, some of the blues come out purplyish. Is that a word ?

 

I have attached a sample we have around 5 different ctb's depending on the out put type fine for smll sheets a bit fatter for large sheets. Oh yeah the mono ctb you use the shift and drag over the pen settings to change colour lineweight etc dont do 1 at a time.

 

 

DesignLaserCOLOUR.ctb 5.01 kB · 1 download

 

Just tried it but everything seems to be set as use colour object, and appears as previously. How do i get the greyscale output with these pen styles

[tombu]

Switch to Autodesk-MONO.stb which installs with AutoCAD using the CONVERTPSTYLES command.  Instead of changing colors set the layers to whatever Plot Style you wish.  Solid plots Black, Normal plots in color, and there's 9 different shades of Grayscale.