Lineweights - CTB's or STB's

[kschultz]

The company I work for has two plotting methods. A group of 4 use line-weights and the remaining company uses CTB's. The leaders of the company would like every CAD user on the same page. They would like to know witch one is better. The group of 4 are doing there own special thing and remaining company does theirs. These two methods are working out great for all of us. There is a big "what happens when" question out there.

I'm looking for some good Pro's & Con's.

[Baghera]

Take a look here

[sinc]

If given the choice, I'd go with STB's. They are better in almost every way. Essentially, they decouple screen appearance and printed appearance. This means that you don't get locked into having most objects in your drawing either red, yellow, or green, the way most drawings end up. You can set screen colors in a more logical way, and not have it affect the plot. Makes drawings much easier to work with, and much easier on the eyes. You can also do many tricks that are impossible with CTBs. For example, it is very simple to make an entire XREF print in light grey in only one drawing, without affecting the relative lineweights.

Also, since STBs incorporate more drawing information in the layers instead of the Plot Style Table, there is less need for multiple STBs. Most companies have many different CTB files. A single STB file is generally sufficient for nearly all uses.

The only drawback to STB's that I've discovered is that there is no way to set either Plot Style or Lineweight for text inside the MTEXT editor. This is a problem when using shape fonts. With CTBs, you can make a single word inside the MTEXT print in bold, simply by changing the color of the word. With STB's, there is no way to do this. You must use a seperate text object for the bold type, which means you must manually move the bold type every time you edit the main text.

[jamsberry]

Richard,

I believe if you use a TrueType font in MTEXT you CAN actually select BOLD as part of the font.

[ian.112852]

I would say it depends on how complex the cad drawings for your discipline are. I do electrical where the cad is very simple and I think CTB's are easier to follow. In an Industry that has a high turnover rate, simplest is best.