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PROBLEM - Drafting in Color / Publishing Black & White


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I, like I assume many, have always drafted in color and published in black & white. At my current firm however, they do a variety of drafting with solid 'fills'; such as indicating new work/walls in sections, interior elevations, etc. And it seems that when I publish in black & white that the solid 'fills' do not appear in the PDFs or when printed. I've also tried publishing in color and converting the PDF to black & white, but in doing so I lose numerous lines and the 'fills' as well.

 

Is this a known issue? Has this been discussed/resolved previously?

 

-Cory

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Assuming you're using class attributes for these objects and displaying them in viewports, I would recommend using class attribute overrides in the viewports.  You can simply override the pen color for all classes to black. You may have a class or two that you don't want black, so this approach gives you the flexibility to control those as well. To do this, select a viewport and click on the "Classes" button in the Object Info palette. Select all of the classes, click Edit, and change the pen color to black.

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17 minutes ago, Andy Broomell said:

What's actually needed is a "Greyscale" option when publishing, as the true "B&W" option erases all fills and even makes grey lines black. I seldom want B&W; Greyscale would be much more useful and solve CW76's problem.

THIS^^

Might it not be possible to make something like the Adobe Acrobat preflight greyscale tool, where PDF options have more depth?

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21 hours ago, Andy Broomell said:

What's actually needed is a "Greyscale" option when publishing, as the true "B&W" option erases all fills and even makes grey lines black. I seldom want B&W; Greyscale would be much more useful and solve CW76's problem.

 

Surprising that VW had not thought of this. I too draw in color and have reverted to printing "as-is" since the B&W option is simply unusable. Grayscale YES!

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
23 hours ago, Andy Broomell said:

What's actually needed is a "Greyscale" option when publishing, as the true "B&W" option erases all fills and even makes grey lines black. I seldom want B&W; Greyscale would be much more useful and solve CW76's problem.

 

I think there are many users that also use pen colors for working but wish them to print black. So, a pure "grayscale" option would (in this case) would result in gray lines. Probably a "Black and White with Grayscale Fills" would be what most users might want?

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2 hours ago, Matt Panzer said:

Probably a "Black and White with Grayscale Fills" would be what most users might want?

I don't use B&W files anymore but when I did I often used single colour gradient fills instead of solid fills as the gradients would print in grayscale in B&W.

image.thumb.png.feabacf20aadcd433d0d9fb9d3380915.pngimage.thumb.png.6225f17e02dfa8e203a7db186e1a484e.png

 

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20 hours ago, Matt Panzer said:

 

I think there are many users that also use pen colors for working but wish them to print black. So, a pure "grayscale" option would (in this case) would result in gray lines. Probably a "Black and White with Grayscale Fills" would be what most users might want?

 

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it... I publish my plans with the intent of having having existing partitions print in gray (color medium blue with blue line hatch fills) and new partitions black (color black with black line hatch fills). The result with a grayscale option in published would then maintain the intended strong differentiation between the two partition types.

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On a Mac, I draft in color, and print in B & W, as follows: Print To PDF (using Mac built-in PDF writer, via Print Menu); open PDF in Preview; Save As applying Grayscale Filter. Works like a charm. However there are certain colors that I have learned from experience print darker than expected, so I stay away from those.

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I draw in color, then override pens in the sheet layer viewport. This gives me total control to turn color lines black, gray lines remain gray, fills are untouched, and special red classes remain red. Viewport class overrides can be copied to other viewports with the eye dropper. It’s very simple and flexible. 

Edited by ThreeDot
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On 2/7/2019 at 8:57 PM, Matt Panzer said:

I think there are many users that also use pen colors for working but wish them to print black. So, a pure "grayscale" option would (in this case) would result in gray lines. Probably a "Black and White with Grayscale Fills" would be what most users might want?

This depends on the origin of the drawing or whether you need to export to DWG. In some cases you will need to have the lines to be grayscale as well for compatibility reasons with DWG files due to the way hatching works in DWG.

So ideally there should be three options for B/W and grayscale printing/publishing:

1. pure B/W (lines and fills)

2. pure grayscale (lines and fills)

3. B/W lines and grayscale fills

 

Workarounds do exist but the problem with workarounds is when people not aware of how to do this  or that they have been used may get frustrated about the output or print the drawings incorrectly.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
15 hours ago, Art V said:

This depends on the origin of the drawing or whether you need to export to DWG. In some cases you will need to have the lines to be grayscale as well for compatibility reasons with DWG files due to the way hatching works in DWG.

So ideally there should be three options for B/W and grayscale printing/publishing: ...

 

However, I wonder if this should be publishing options rather than display options. You shouldn't have to fiddle with these every time you publish. But I suppose we'd also need them as printing options as well. Something to think about...

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9 hours ago, Matt Panzer said:

However, I wonder if this should be publishing options rather than display options. You shouldn't have to fiddle with these every time you publish. But I suppose we'd also need them as printing options as well. Something to think about... 

These options are needed for printing/publishing as the PDFs and graphics need to look that way when printed, whether it is controlled through display options in the viewports or otherwise is ultimately not that relevant.

 

The issue could be solved by having printing profiles similar to AutoCADs plotsyle tables so that next time you simply select a printing profile fr the desired output. That might actually be a more elegant solution than having to create multiple sheetlayers with viewport settings if you need to output in both full colour and grayscale for varous purposes.

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