Screened plot

[David Aynardi]

I am looking for a way to apply a dot-screen to parts of the printed output of a drawing. This will allow me to print some of the linework in gray. The dot-screen needs to be sufficintly coarse to allow subsequent xerox copies of the plot to remain gray, not turn back to black.

I used to do this by screening layers in Microstation. There must be a Vectorworks equivalent.

-DA

[Guest]

VectorWorks gives you at least two options which sound like they might apply:

1) you can fill 2D objects with a pattern

2) you can fill 2D objects with a hatch

If your goal is to fill some polygons on your drawing with a sort of dithered gray, then the pattern sounds like the best bet. Patterns always have a foreground and background color, however, so you won't be able to see objects behind a polygon that's filled with a pattern.

If your goal is to de-emphasize regions of your drawing by lightening them, you might try drawing some polygons over the appropriate areas and filling those polygons with a hatch. Hatches work in this respect because they don't have to have a background fill color. To lighten the areas, use a hatch with the line color set to white. To darken, use a hatch with the line color set to black. One drawback to using hatches in this manner is that hatches are always constructed of straight line segments, while I expect you'd rather use dots. Very short lines look a lot like dots, of course. ;-)

[CipesDesign]

Caleb, I've often wondered why hatches cannot contain dots (much like a fill) AND ALSO why a fill cannot have one of its elements (fore- or background) be hollow. PLC

[MikeB]

CipesDesign

You can virtually have dots in your hatches by making your line segments really really short. I've created several hatches that resemble the old zipatone patterns by doing this.

[CipesDesign]

Mike B, Thanks. I am aware of that but it takes an awful lot of very short lines, placed at a precise distance from each other to mimic that type of shading. Anyway, it's not that big a deal.

PLC

[Dave M]

Here is another alternative:

A dot screen was originally a work-around for screened mylars that were originally created in black and white. You couldn't have a gray mylar, but VW will let you make gray objects. I usually create a separate layer for gray objects, make the layer color gray (my favorite is the 4th row, 5th column in the V8 color palette), and set the drawing preferences to show layer colors.

[David Aynardi]

Drawing with gray objects does not work because the first time someone xeroxes the drawing it turns back to black. A relateively coarse dot-screen is needed to prevent this. With a good dot screen there is never any question if something is screened no matter how bad a copy is. This is critical in remodel work, where extent of new vs existing is the subject of many jobsite debates, often with a very grubby copy of a drawing as the centerpiece of the conference table.

We've tried overlaying white hatches, but the process is cumbersome.

Best work-around so far is to draw with pen-pattern, but this doesn't control by level and requires new symbols just to achieve a half-tone print.

[Marietta]

Have you tried turning that layer to gray? Depending on the elements in that layer, it would work. Text and groups would show up as an outline though, but line work should work fine. if not how about using line dashes?