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Scaling line weights?


carbons2k

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Yesterday there was a meeting of the minds in my office. The engineers and the architects decided to talk about line weights and drafting... without having the senior Cad designer in the conference. After about 4 hours of bickering the meeting let out and I am presented with the following question: Is there a way to scale line weights on the same dwg between each viewport? I feel like it was more of demand rather than a question... Ive been trying to research this and have even gone and asked Cad managers from different companies this question and Ive gotten the same answer, "why would you want to do that?"

 

 

So for clarity, if my yellow line prints out at .0075 with 3/4" scale detail, when I have a 1 1/2" scale detail, can my same yellow line print at .015? We use at ctb files to plot.

 

 

From what I have gathered its not 'correct practice' to do it, and the only way to do it is to switch to an stb system and manually override those specific lines. We already have company standard that we use for line weights and they were talking about reinventing the wheel to make the dwgs be more ascetically pleasing to the eye. This is one animal Id rather NOT get my hands into and just try to work on making the dwgs look good with the system we already have in place.

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You can certainly have different lineweights set in different viewports for each layer, you can even have different colors for those layers. The question is do you do that manually, I would imagine that LISP can do this fairly easily.

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With a .ctb, you would have to use a different color to get a different lineweight. It's just the nature of the beast.

 

Does 2014 have the ability to change colors per viewport? If so, that might work in your situation but it means either finding a color that is set to the appropriate lineweight or assigning one.

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I don't think there would be an easy way to do what Im being asked to do. Even writing a lisp to get the job done wouldn't be all that easy because Id have to first have the company agree on line weights then Id have to find the appropriate thickness per scale of the detail, then write the lisp. When working with 10-12 different scales, it can be a tedious venture.

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After the values were set for the lines they could be set up in a template Im sure. But to have the lines physically print different per viewport is what Im trying to get done first.

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Page set-ups are for saving your plot settings. The setting for scaling lineweights is for when you are plotting to a different size paper. It doesn't work for viewports with different scales, AFAIK.

Edited by RobDraw
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So for clarity, if my yellow line prints out at .0075 with 3/4" scale detail, when I have a 1 1/2" scale detail, can my same yellow line print at .015? We use at ctb files to plot.

 

Why not just convert them to polylines and assign them a width? The width plots to scale unlike lineweight which is the same at any scale. I'd make sure their lineweight was 0 to make sure it didn't affect it.

 

Before they introduced STB's 16 years ago I had to do this myself.

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Bc when I have to work on a different detail in another scale, the thickness the line prints at has to change as well... This is what Im being asked to 'figure out'

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Bc when I have to work on a different detail in another scale, the thickness the line prints at has to change as well... This is what Im being asked to 'figure out'

 

It will, at 1 1/2" scale it will plot twice as wide as it would at 3/4" scale. Polyline width plots to scale unlike lineweight which is the same at any scale. Converting to polylines is the only way without using an STB. Keep in mind since the width is scaled down to the viewports scale it would have to be that many times larger. A width of 1 at 20 scale would plot 0.05 wide.

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My $0.05 you can in different viewports have the same line different colours and then set lineweight you could maybe as a second pass on this change the colour also all done in the ctb but the limitation would be the number available 256. Again very much manually done.

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From my experience the only time I've done something similar is when I needed to show the true width of something. A stop bar painted on the road is 2 feet wide so I use a polyline width of 2 so no matter what scale it's plotted it will scale 2 feet wide.

 

Not sure if that's what they wanted, I was just guessing.

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