XREF ?, I think...

Excuse my ignorance, this may be basic...I only do basic layouts in CAD but do have another question.

We do layout & rough-ins for commercial kitchens / restaurants.

I've seen other designers where when they do there plumbing / electrical rough-ins the basic layout is subdued in a lighter shade on the plot and then the mechanical data for the rough-ins is darker therefore making it easier to read.

How best to do this?

I've been playing around with the following. Please let me know if I'm on the right track or how best to do. Keep in mind we're running AutoCAD 2000...

Been Missing With:

- Blowing up all items and then changing all lines to a specific layer / linetype / color.

- Taking the above and creating an XREF

- Dropping in rough-in's as needed.

- Missing with plotting with pen assignment as 'GrayScale'

- Just tried adjusting fade via:

- Tools

- Options

- Display Tab

- Reference Edit fading intensity

So far I'm getting the layout XREF in the lighter shade as desired but the mechanical stuff (on a separate layer) is also lighter.

Thoughts?

it sounds like you are on the right track for your applications but your going to need to learn alot more about autocad in order to do these things correctly.

The layers that you want to plot lighter can be assigned a pen color, say 8 for gray. Edit the .CTB file you will be plotting with and change pen color 8 to a thin line weight and you can also set the screening to a percentage.

The other layers you want darker can be assigned to other pen colors, say 7, and then you edit the .CTB so pen color 7 is a thicker line, pen color 6 can be slightly thinner than 7, and so on.

Assuming you are plotting black and white, make sure the color the pen colors are set to is B/W.

Thanks.

I've been playing with the line color / thickness but we don't have a plotter in-house; just a multi-function laser - that may be skewing my results.

I'm sending a PDF to Thomas Repro to see how it looks on a full sheet.

You could also change the darkness of printing by just messing with the Layer line weights. Make sure that everything you want to print light is on a layer that has a smaller line weight.

With messing with .CTB files, if you send the AutoCAD file to someone or move it to a new computer make sure that you send/move the .CTB file with the drawing. If you change the line weights in a .CTB file and you try and print the drawing from another computer it will not print correctly because dont have the correct printing file. When you are messing with a .CTB file you are printing "By Color" thats what we call it. When you are messing with layers and there line weights you are printing "By Line Weight" and you dont need to mess with the .CTB file.

In your case I would probably jsut change the Layers line weights