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Hello All, Here in my office (oil and gas facilities planning) we're looking at revising some of our CAD practices. One of these involves drawing certain blocks that describe machinery (pumps, motors, gear boxes, loading arms, etc) so that when they lay over each other on plan drawings, you don't see wireframe bleeding through from the blocks underneath. In the past, drafters have exploded and trimmed these blocks to get the right look, but that way (obviously) lies madness. I am toying with the idea of adding a masking solid shape into each block to mask the parts that lie beneath, but how to best do that I don't know. It would be nice to just draw a filled solid PLINE shape that plots white (that is, doesn't plot on paper) but I can't figure out how to do that. There's also the solid option, but I don't like that much because you can't draw them with true, smooth curves. So how would y'all tackle this? All I can think of given the above constraints is to create pre-trimmed versions of each block, since our pump assemblies tend to go together only a few different ways each time, almost without exception...

I have a dwg that I'm using paperspace for text with a viewport of an xref'd 3D model, I have some mtext with background masking, using drawing background color, border offset factor of 1.2, it only masks when I hover over the text. I used Draworder and brought the mtext to the front, nothing I do works, what can the problem be? Fill is on, shademode is 2Dwireframe. I am using Acad 2011. Thanks for any help! R. L. Hamm