"Merge" lines from different elevations

[sven.129574]

A user is trying to make PDFs of a plan drawing that has lines at different elevations. However, he is finding that higher-up gray lines (contour lines at actual elevations) are covering up black lines at lower elevations, making them hard to read. This is happening even though we've tried a couple different PDF printers (PDF995 and DWG To PDF.pc3), and have set the lines to "merge" instead of "overlap" for both printers. Is there a way to make gray + black = black, even though the gray is higher up? Nothing I've found in my searches seems to work.

[cadtag]

DRAWORDER would be my suggestion. Move the contour lines to the back, and that should resolve that problem.

[sven.129574]

DRAWORDER had only intermittent effect, perhaps because so many items in the drawing were part of XRefs. While DRAWORDER occasionally caused the black to show through the gray, it oftentimes had no effect on coincident lines, and sometimes brought to the foreground grays that had previously been in the background.

I did have a little better luck doing an export to PDF instead of a plot. Still not a perfect solution, but better than plotting, for some reason. Might have been lick of the draw, for all I know.

Not sure why setting lines to merge instead of overwrite doesn't work, though.

[cadtag]

Merge combines the lines, so if you have a 40% screen over a black line, you'll end up with a 70% gray. Which is still gray. Merge is something I have little to no use for normally.

It sounds as though xrefs are not thought thru. Since the xref is one object (regardless of what is in it) draw order affects the whole xref. Yoou may need to separate things out more