Topic Title

First, what we're trying to do. We would like to use a light shade over areas that drop in the ceiling so they are easily recognized. When we plot this, it would be nice to have the light colored shading over the plan.

Is this possible? The only way I can find to do it is if I plot the whole drawing in color. If I check "all black" in the pen settings table it just prints a black blob on top of everything.

TIA!

I've figured out one way, but it may kill me with file size. I made a small bitmap square and use the SPB fill with it set to that bitmap.

With the "print bitmaps first" setting in the pen table this works, but it may enlarge my file sizes too much.

I'd still like to know if there's another way to do this without using bitmaps.

Thanks!

If you are wanting to plot in black/greyscale you'll need to setup a pen table up where you have your pens mapped to black, and then for your halftones you set the percentage density you want. The smaller the number the lighter that pen will plot. Now make sure the map fill colors to pen colors is checked. Then in the SBF setting box make sure you have fill color set to entity. Now your all set. If you look at my pen table, if I draw a fill with Light Cyan if will be shaded at 20%, which is pretty light. hope this helps ya out.


You can also map your pens to colors, and apply the same principles to get halftone color fills.

That looks perfect! Thanks!

Another way to get shading without changing your pen settings is to use a "Fill". If you go to the fill menu and select a fill do not use a color that is listed in the color bar on top. As long as you select a color and EDIT it to a nother shade from its original it wwill print in a gray scale if you print that way. If you print in color it prints in color. You may encounter some problems however if your shade is very close to the assigned pen color. I use this when I want to shade in color without elliminating my black pens. My e-mail is jlm@designbuildstructures.com if you have any other comments or questions.