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drawing in color & printing in black&white


cami

Question

I did a drawing in vectorworks where I gave the different classes different colors to facilitate my drawing, Allowing me to know which class is which while I draw. Also I have a few color fils etc. But when it came to printing I realized that the drawing printed in color not black & white.

Is there anyway where I can have my drawing classes have color so that I can distinguise between them while drawing but have them print in B&W & keeping all my fills in color or grey.

P.S. I already tried changing the drawing to B&W but I lost my color fills.

PLease help

Cami

Thanks

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11 answers to this question

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Or you could select everything and use the Attributes palette to change everything's line color to black, without changing its fill color.

Save the file before doing that, and exit without saving after printing, so that you can keep working in non-wysiwyg mode. Or, if all lines were previously Class Color, just Select All again and change line color back to Class Color.

[ 03-13-2006, 08:41 PM: Message edited by: jan15 ]

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cami,

The use of the color drawing/B&W printing process has some limitation/conventions. My experience in VW, color fills DO NOT reproduce as "greyscale" fills on b&w printers. The color fills are strictly color values recognized only by color output devices (printers & monitors). To get printable greyscale fills try using the fill patterns and adjust the density of the "screen" pattern accordingly.

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Maybe I misunderstand the issue, but I do the same thing. Draw in color and print to B & W printer. I didn't like the grayscale handling of printing the color drawing, so this is what I do.

When I'm ready to print, I simply go to: preferences>document preference>display and check the "black and white only" box. After the print job has been sent to the printer, I go back and uncheck. Works great, and is simple. I'm pretty sure I've seen a plug-in script for doing just that. I just don't remember where!

Hope this helps.

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Those things are all well and good until you want to print a black and white line drawing with colored regions for a diagram or schematic type presentation.

Ideally a class would have an on screen representation (ie color) and could be told to PRINT color or b/w individually. A number of other CAD programs do this and for offices that want to use CAD and color together VW is a pain in the rear.

Converting everything to a black or white line except what you want in color and then printing but then being careful not to save it is a really half-a*sed attempt at making it work. It certianly doesn't aide speed or ease of use which is what should be first and foremost in software developers minds.....

This has to be the biggest issue for me as a CAD manager with VW. I want the ability to control an object or class on screen properties (color) separate from the printed output.

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quote:

Originally posted by cami:

Is there anyway where I can have my drawing classes have color so that I can distinguise between them while drawing but have them print in B&W & keeping all my fills in color or grey.

We're just looking into this now. I think we're going to settle on this method: draw in colour using your classes while leaving your layers on black and white. When you come to print go to Document Preferences > Display and click on 'User Layer Colors'.

This method also gives you the ability to use colour on the odd occasion when printing as well, by layer (good for redlines or the like).

[ 04-13-2006, 10:55 AM: Message edited by: Christiaan ]

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why can't it be designed that the classes can be controlled v7w/color instead of the layers? I can think of mulitple times where I would not necessarily want an object on a seperate layer but would still want it in color.....

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I agree - one of the few things I miss from AutoCAD is the ability to set up and save different plotting configurations. Each layer (class in VW) could be set to print a specific color regardless of screen color. It was great for shop drawings - different dimension classes could be printed with different colors, allowing for quick reference and fewer mistakes.

I stopped using the Black screen option in VW because if I decided to print in color...

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