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Appearance of lineweights


Alina H

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When drawing in 2D, the appearance of lineweights on vectorworks all look the same, unless its 0.35mm+. So if I have drawn a line with a lineweight of 0.25, it still appears to look like a  0.05 line. Once made into a PDF, the lineweights show correctly. It just doesn't show correctly when looking at the drawing on vectorworks. Is there a way to fix this?

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This will help, but will not solve all the problems. Screen solution is not fine enough to offer all line weight thicknesses.

 

The new Apple Studio Display has a pixel density of 218 pixels per inch. Older displays normally are much lower down around 100 pixels per inch.

 

1 inch is 1000 mils, so 1 pixel on the studio display is  ~4.6 mils.

 

So if you tell the Studio display to show a line of less than about 7 mils you will get a single pixel line.  Less than 12 will give you 2 pixels, etc.

 

And then there is other line scaling being done to try and display the proper line thickness on diagonal lines that would show the diagonal dimension of the pixel instead of the edge.

 

So due to the current pixel size of monitors you are never going to be able able to show every line thickness correctly.  A PDF at 300 or 600 dpi will have a much better chance of displaying your intent.

 

Kevin is correct that Zoom to line thickness will help show lines at relative sizes, but it can't overcome the step sizes provided by the pixel size.

 

 

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  • 1 year later...

I'm also having this problem after switching to PC. However I tested my new Dell Ultrasharp 4k 163ppi monitor as a second display with my iMac prior to moving across to widows. I found that I could see line weight difference between 0.18~0.25. 5K retina clearly showed 0.18. 


For some reason now that I am running on PC, the 4K display is only showing liveweights from 0.35. 


Would somebody have any idea what's going on? 

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