Help for us pre vectorworks CADsmen

[The Hamma]

I have a an idea. I would work to my advantage for VW to have the ability to print all as black and white, which it does have, but with the exception of the gray scales. In this way all colors would print black, but all gray scales would remain gray. Then I could draw as I am accustomed to black screen colors representing line weights, and grays being grays.

[DDDesign]

Rather than change the VW prefs, if you change the printer output settings to print black and white, doesn't this have the same effect?

[Kevin]

In my experience, colors will print as levels of grey when setting your printer to print greyscale.

I do not think that it is currently possible to do what The Hamma wants to do.

[jan15]

Hamma is talking about the old Autocad practice (still in common use though better methods have been available for the last five years) of mapping displayed color to print-out lineweight and color.

Under that system, every office had its own mapping of colors to lineweights, and of course most of them were to print out as black, but it was common to use one or more of the gray screen colors to represent gray print-out lines, a rare example of straight-forward thinking in that environment.

Hamma's suggestion is basically that VW should be redesigned so that people accustomed to using dinosaur technology won't have to re-train to adapt to the 21st century.

[Chris D]

We haven't got our copies of Vectorworks 12 yet :-( but I imagine that the new viewport class overrides will give you this functionality - you could use colors in the design layers that are over-ridden in the viewport to print as black.

[ 11-25-2005, 03:59 AM: Message edited by: Chris D ]