Topic Title

The addition of the "Pen Sort" toggle to the Print/Plot menu has further enhanced the control you have over the order in which lines are printed in your drawings. Prior to the introduction of this feature, you used the Pen Table to set the order in which lines printed. Anywhere that lines crossed over each other, the Pen Assignment number for each line (based on line color) determined which printed first (beneath) and which printed second (on top).

The image below shows an example of reversing the order of printing by changing the Pen Assignment number for two colors:



Bitmaps and solid fills are handled separately via the "Bitmaps and Fills" setting at the bottom of the Pen Table dialog. When set on "Print First," bitmaps and fills print beneath lines. When set on "Print Last," they print on top of lines. When set on "In Order," they are printed using layer order (lowest number first, highest number last) to determine whether they are beneath or on top of lines that occupy the same space. The "Map fill colors to pen colors" setting can be checked if you wish to print solid fills in a color other than the screen color. Click the "Map to color" setting for the pen number assigned to the solid fill's screen color, and then select a new color in which to print it.

Entities which have the KnockOut property assigned obey the same rules, based upon the color of the entity. If you have drawn hatching in red and assigned it to Pen 3, and then added text with KnockOut enabled in green and assigned it to Pen 2, the hatching will be printed on top of the text even though KnockOut is enabled for the text entity. In order for the KnockOut to print correctly, you must make sure to assign the text color (green) to a higher pen number than the hatch color (red). This is where the Pen Sort option can be useful.

The Pen Sort toggle in the Print/Plot menu determines whether or not the draw order for information on the printed page is defined by the Pen Table or by layer order. When this option is on (default), DataCAD will continue to print objects based on their Pen Assignment order, as in previous versions. Colors assigned to Pen 1 are printed first, and then colors assigned to Pen 2 are printed next, continuing through the list of Pen Assignments. If you toggle Pen Sort off, then objects are printed based on layer order and the order in which the objects were added to the drawing. For example, objects drawn on Layer001 are drawn first, and then objects on Layer002 are drawn next. If two objects on the same layer intersect, the one that was drawn first is on the bottom, and the one that was drawn second is on top. You can use the Move command to move objects in front of or behind each other.