forum.datacad.com

Thanks to some temporary ACAD expert help I have now had my pen tables overwritten.
Normally, I print in black and a couple of shades of gray with the variations being only in line width. Now, I get colors for certain things, blacks and grays for others and interesting prints from Adobe.
The Adobe PDF file will show our old Helvetica Fill in color, but print in a washed out gray depending on the assigned line width. Roman shows black on the PDF file, but prints with the washed out look.
When I go to the pen table and check all black, that's pretty much what everything does and I have access to no gray shades at all.
If I check the print to color options and select what I assume is black in the bottom left corner of the standards, the plot shows the screen color and prints the washed out gray variations.
When I show 255 in each box of the stack at the right, the indicator climbs up to a white level, but shows black when I save a custom color.
What am I needing to see to get blacks and grays?
Makes me miss my pen carousel. Slow, but I knew what I was going to get for final output.

Can you post a screenshot of your pen table and let us know which colors should have halftones? Sounds like your densities might be off, but would be best if we can see the pen table itself.

I've never inserted and image to the forum. When I do print screen and paste as I would in a word document, I get nothing.
I also use Snag-it, but have that on my computer at home.

Hi Woody,

You can do a Print Screen to get the whole screen, or Alt-Print Screen to capture just the active program, and then Control-V into a image editor (like IrfanView) and then save it to a PNG / JPG / BMP. then upload the file with the Upload attachment below this post area. After you upload it, you can place it "inline" so it appears in the post window.

Windows has a tool called "Snipping Tool" that works well for grabbing screenshots.

Thanks Neil. I downloaded IrfanView and grabbed the active areas as needed. Nice.
I may still be messing up with this since it shows three file comments for this single note. They display in reverse order also.
The pen table is what I have. As you see, there are two pens that I want to print as gray and the others should print as a width of black.
The screen is what I see for the plot.
The Print-preview is what I see then, but the colors print in some washed out shade of almost black. It seems that the "wash out" is tied to the line width, but even the widest printing lines still are detectable as not black.
Thank you,

Whoa... Josh. That little gem may end up being used so often that I'll get blisters on my tender little fingers.
Thanks for that bit of information.

So it looks like you are trying to get Pen 4 & Pen 12 to print gray or halftone. I see that Dark Grey is mapped to Pen 4 but don't see anything (on screen) at least that is mapped to Pen 12. Since the Dark Grey is already a grey color it's hard to tell in the print preview what is driving the output. But for the Light Magenta title it looks like it should be printing using Pen 2. Can you identify the Light Magenta text (or view it's properties) and verify that it is reporting back Light Magenta as the entity color? I am wondering if maybe the font setting for the text is not using Fill/Outline with current color or something that might be over riding the pen table.

Also are you using Pen Sort in the Print Settings menu?

So our old school way of getting grey output is by using Pen Sort and then mapping the pen to black (RGB 0,0,0,) and then adjusting the Percent Density down to make the output lighter. Also the order is driven by the pen order so for us Pens 1-4 are grey where Pen 1 Prints first, then Pen 2 on top of Pen 1. Pen 3 is on top of Pen 2 and Pen 1 and so on.

Josh. You've given me a glimmer of the reason for my difficulties, but I'm not sure what the solution will be. It's related to the ttx fonts for sure. All of our old DataCAD fonts are working as they should based on the pen number itself. The ttx fonts seem to lie somehow.
The linework plots per normal line width settings.
I'll mess with these and see what jumps out at me.
I'm not using pen sort although I have the button for print last selected.

A quick work around involved changing all of the ttx fonts to white. That made them all print as black which is what I want.

It is probably a separate issue, but I would recommend putting the lightest gray / color as Pen 1, and the second lightest as Pen 2, and so on. The thinnest black line should be right after the darkest gray / color, then the next wider black after that, and so on.

This plots things with the proper pen merge. If a gray line and a black line cross, the black line should "cover" the gray line, and that happens when the pen order 1 through 15 are lightest to darkest.

Excellent idea. I'll do that.