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Screen Line Thickness


dougie29

Question

I know screen line thicknesses have been discussed previously but in VW11 it needs to be improved. You must make a way for the representative thickness of lines on the screen to be customized. A line which I intend to PRINT at 5mm should DISPLAY as some "X" width on my screen that stays the same no matter how far in or out I zoom. Who cares that a scaled line increases in thickness as I zoom in on the screen. As an architect I need the lines to differentiate objects in space and it's impossible to 'read' the drawings if the line thickness constantly change or if there are 7 colors representing line thickness (as in AUTOCAD).

Maybe make the printed line thickness settings correspond to fixed pixel widths on my screen...or something similar.

If this can get fixed somehow, our entire office would upgrade to VW...

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quote:

Originally posted by dougie29:

...A line which I intend to PRINT at 5mm should DISPLAY as some "X" width on my screen that stays the same no matter how far in or out I zoom....

What you've described is how Autocad does it, and theirs is a terrible system. When you zoom out, all the thick lines become one giant smudge. I think that's why noone uses lineweights with Autocad.

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When you turn the zoom line thickness feature off, there is NO line heirarchy. It sure is a pain to constantly switch that feature on and off. And when it's on, why must it fatten the lines as I zoom in?

I guess what I'm saying is that the feature doesn't make sense when zooming in, which often is the case.

I see its usefullness when zooming far out however.

Inevitably, there should be a way to scale the line display.

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I agree with jan15, ACAD has had line thicknesses for 5 years now and I don't know anyone who uses them. This is partly because old habits die hard but also because there is only one particular zoom factor where the lines accurately represent the output, everything else either loses definition or is a blurred mess. WYSIWYG is the base of the VW display format.

[ 05-11-2005, 10:01 AM: Message edited by: Delmer ]

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If you don't already have it, here is a script to toggle line thickness on and off.

Procedure TogglePref;

VAR

PrefID:INTEGER;

PrefStatus:BOOLEAN;

BEGIN

PrefID := 9;

PrefStatus := GetPref(PrefID);

SetPref(PrefID, NOT PrefStatus);

Layer(GetLName(ActLayer)); {succeeds where ReDrawAll fails ****}

END;

Run(TogglePref);

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quote:

Originally posted by dougie29:

When you turn the zoom line thickness feature off, there is NO line heirarchy.

you mean you want to see the different line weights but, for the purpose of drafting, a "thin" version?

quote:

Originally posted by dougie29:

It sure is a pain to constantly switch that feature on and off.

Absolutely! I got a free tool from one of the addon sites which toggles it on and off, and use it all the time.

quote:

Originally posted by dougie29:

And when it's on, why must it fatten the lines as I zoom in?


But that's the whole point of WYSIWYG isn't it? You are seeing what will print out.

quote:

Originally posted by dougie29:

Inevitably, there should be a way to scale the line display.

I can see that optioncould be usefull but it's never been an issue for me.

N.

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Maybe I'm not describing my frustration...small essay is attached...

You will never be able to "see" what you print out unless you have a monitor the actual size of the paper. My 24x36 paper gets proportioned into a 19" monitor. If I had a 24x36 sized monitor (ie) I would never need to zoom, every line would show as printed.

Therefore I am required to zoom into the drawing to work with greater precision. Then all the lines get fatter because I've magified the view and I can't see what I'm drawing because its a blob of lines. (thanks for the zoom toggle shortcut btw).

So lets say I start to zoom out to half the actual size. Gradually the lines become identical and on my screen all lines become the same thickness. It becomes hard graphically to read the drawing without line heirarchy.

I guess I'm in the minority about this. I used the drafting element of formZ for a while and it has the best line graphics on the screen of any program I've used, and I can set how thick in pixels I want the lines to be represented. (its a lousy cad program though). I think you might be impressed it you could see it in action.

So what do other people do to keep their line weights organized if you can't see them? (without using colors)

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Dougie,

If you've drawn lines so close together that they overlap and become a blob when zoomed in, you probably should either change the scale or leave out some of those lines.

For me, the great thing about VW's lineweight display, after many years of old Autocad, is that it won't let me delude myself. It shows me exactly what the print will look like. If I try to draw two lines 1/2" apart at 1/8" scale, it immediately shows me that the two lines will be indistinguishable on the print-out. With "Zoom Line Thickness" turned off, or in old Autocad mode, I could zoom in and put some text in that 1/2" space. But it would be a waste of time.

Not being able to distinguish lineweights when zoomed out is partly due to the very poor resolution of monitors compared to printers.

I can remember wishing, when I started using VW, that the lineweight distinctions would show when zoomed out. Of course the reason I never missed that in old Autocad was because there were no lineweights even when zoomed in.

Maybe it would be good idea to be able to choose to have some exaggeration when zoomed out. But it might be a very difficult thing for the manufacturer to do, especially if it's something that can be turned off. You say FormZ handled that trade-off well, but look how badly Autocad screwed it up.

Perhaps you could give your lineweights color codes, and then convert everything to black before printing. Or just wait a while and see if you get used to zooming in to check lineweight.

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I do get frustrated when I'm drafting or checking over other's drawings and I can't tell the lineweight without going into the Zoom Lineweights Mode (ZLM?). I find it reasonably cumbersome to draft with this mode activated, and struggle with the fact that there is no way to tell what lineweights are with it off, short of selecting every line or shape one at a time and checking the attributes palette. Microstation did (does?) a better job than both Acad & VW in this area. It would show a relative thickness for all linework that was representative to the actual lineweight. I don't think the thickness was relative to the zoom scale. Something like this would be a get drafting improvement to the current VW setup. VW does this somewhat now for by differentiating the shown thickness for lines over .70 mils thick versus those under. It would be really helpful if VW could even expand that capability to show different thicknesses to say 4-5 relative lineweight ranges on the screen. .03-.15 could be the thinnest shown lineweight, .16-.30 could be the next, .31-.45, .46-.69, and .70+ . This could be a nice blend of WYSIWYG with ZLM and provide a efficent way to draft with it off.

As usual, just my two cents.

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Just a thought...

If you take the Draw it once, then WGR or viewport it so allot of the time we draw with the layer scales set to say 1:100 but zoom in to part an add info that may only appear at say 1:20. To that end the layer scale of design layers is still important but also a little fluid.

So i think it might be useful and intuitive if there was a view option for WYSIWYG based on a drawing scale that is closet to the current zoom factor, not just the set layer scale.

I effect we do this already by using WGR's to pull a view of some layers into a file where the layer scale is changed. It could also be done with Layer Links. That said i still think it would be a great feature to have, applied to everyday drawing views.

The only problem would be how it treats Text and scale dependant PIO's (i.e. drawing labels and the like).

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