trouble with certain layer printing ledgibly

[ferriein]

When I print this drawing the desks (in yellow) as well as the room tag (blue) do not show up. They print extremely faded and can barely be seen. I've tried fixing this by adjusting the line via the layer manager but have not had any luck.

Can anyone provide me with a way to have these items print at a normal level (opacity?)

Thanks in advance.
-Ian

[ferriein]

hmm, seem to have messed up attachment. here it is...

[acote]

Acad Version?? What are you using for a color table??

ACote

[ferriein]

I am using ADT 2007. I am not sure what color table I'm using (I'm not that familiar with this program at this point). The layers I am referring to print at around 10% (very feint) whether i print in color or just black linework.

[dzatto]

Find out what color the layer is set to. I know you said yellow, but there is several yellows in a 256 color palette.
So, after you find that out by looking in your layer manager, print.
When the print dialogue box opens, you should see your Plot style table in the upper right corner (where mine says 11X17.ctb in the attached screen shot). If not, hit the big arrow in the bottom right corner to expand your plotting box.

Okay, now hit the pen icon next to the plot style table drop down (where you choose different plot styles). This gets you into the editor. Go to the Form View tab on top and choose color 2 (assuming that is the correct yellow). To the right you will see the colors properties. The color is probably set to yellow, just set it to black and that should fix it.

Yellow has hardly any pigment and when you're printing yellow on a black and white printer, it prints very faint by nature.

[ferriein]

Thanks, I'm having a little trouble still. When I select the edit plot styles button and then go to the Form View tab I am not presented with a list of the various colors like your screen shot shows. Rather, only "Normal" and "Style 1" are listed. I've tried doing the same procedure to every Plot style I have listed but I get similar results with them all.

A related issue that I am having is that we are having to send our drawings to a slower printer that only has black ink because when we send drawings to our better, color printer - it prints out in color despite our best efforts at trying to set up the drawing to print in monochrome. This may be too much to tackle in one post...

I appreciate your help so far. Thanks.

[Chuckyd67]

Try using the full features of ADT, instead of the "vanilla" ACAD. This will help, because all the elements drawn with the ADT features will be automatically placed on the correct layer with the correct colors. Then, using the OOTB pen tables, your plots will appear correctly.

There is a tutorial in the help screen for drawing with ADT objects, and that should help you, as well.

[ferriein]

unfortunately the object that is giving me the headache is steelcase cabinet which is essentially a predrawn 3d object that the office drags into our drawings so that we can later extract a parts list for ordering.

[dzatto]

Thanks, I'm having a little trouble still. When I select the edit plot styles button and then go to the Form View tab I am not presented with a list of the various colors like your screen shot shows. Rather, only "Normal" and "Style 1" are listed. I've tried doing the same procedure to every Plot style I have listed but I get similar results with them all.

A related issue that I am having is that we are having to send our drawings to a slower printer that only has black ink because when we send drawings to our better, color printer - it prints out in color despite our best efforts at trying to set up the drawing to print in monochrome. This may be too much to tackle in one post...

I appreciate your help so far. Thanks.

Oh, okay. You're using .STB plot styles inseatd of color dependent .CTB plot styles. I don't use those, but I'll try to help you out.

You should be able to open your layer manager and find the layer that the objects are on. You will see a header for plot styles. That's where you can choose either Normal or Style 1.

Since you only have 2 options, I would start there and choose whatever the other on is and see if that plots better. If not, you can go back to your .STB edit (through the plot dialogue box) and create another plot style. There you can set it up to print black, full screen, linewidth, etc. Name it, save it. Then go back to the layer manager and assign it to that layer.

Like I said, I don't use them so I'm not to versed on them, but see if that works and let me know.

[ferriein]

Ok. So I've had some time to try this all out and your suggestions worked so I'm eternally grateful. The problem seems to be that in this office, some people have ctb plot styles by default while others have stb plot styles by default. the stb folks end up having to use the 'convertpstyles' command in order to acces the ctb styles (thereby avoiding the stb color complications). our default templates are all ctb files though so this has me scratching my head a little.

I'm currently working on trying to figure out how to get the entire office on the same page...

Thanks again for all your help!!!