Want to thicken up lines on a line drawing so it prints better.

rubadub

I have a line drawing done in a CAD package. Lots of thin coloured lines. When these are printed they almost disappear. Now in a CAD package I can adjust "pen assignments" and have certain colours thicker than others.

But I want to send this out to be printed by anybody, e.g. as a PDF or word file etc.

Problem is they come out barely visible. In the past I just blurred the whole picture about 5 times, and then sharpened it and adjusted contrast (in photoshop). This beefed up the lines well. Is there a better way of doing this? in the past my drawings were basic, this is more intricate.

Number one

This could have something to the scale of the drawing you are printing. Make a new pen assignment and give each colour a line thickness. Take for example 1:100 thicker lines at .3mm and thinest black .05 Try using only a few different colours and linewidths. This obviously depends what the drawing is off.

Download a pdf printer and install it, then when you go to plot select this printer and you can print a pdf file.

Also are you printing from model or layout space? LAyout space allows you to pick a page size and create a viewport and choose the scale. If you need to know anything F1 is always helpful too (not trying to be smart it does answer most questions).

If you double click on a line in model space you can add a global width to it which also beefs it up but its better to have it on a layer where you can change all lines on a specific layer / colour when printing etc

rubadub

Great stuff, thanks.

I actually already have a PDF printer and it works well. When I print out our usual drawings for staff they are in black & white, i.e. I have assigned the black colour to all my usual colours, and adjusted the thickness. i.e. yellow is thin, black is thick, so when printed they are both pure black but one is thinner. This is since the colours are hard to see for normal use and leaving in colour results in the printers doing rastered/dotted lines.

I will have to change all my plot colour settings, I might be able to find this file and back it up, then change and rename it for future reference. Or else I can just pick slightly different colours for this particular drawing, e.g. a different yellow, so it will still print yellow.

I prefer to print from layout/paper space, but was resorting to model. But with the PDF I can go back to paper space.

I have fairly high res on my monitor and just moved toolbars etc out of the way and zoomed in. Then I did a screen grab, brought into photoshop, and did my blur and sharpen, but the PDF is working much better.

Thanks again!

Mellor

Easiest way is a new CTB pen table, that way you can have your normal one (acad.ctb?) that prints coloured lines black at different thicknesses, and the new one (eg. "pdf_colour"). Edit the new pen table so that all colours print as they are, ie yellow is yellow, red is red etc. This will save you editing the colour of the each line ("e.g. a different yellow, so it will still print yellow").
This applies if you want to make it a colour PDF,

If you want a black and white one then you just need to just your normal pen table with a PDF creator/writer

rubadub

Mellor wrote: »

Easiest way is a new CTB pen table, that way you can have your normal one (acad.ctb?)

Cheers. My file with pen assignments is aclt4.cfg . BTW the way I found this out is simply change the pen assignments then do a search in my autocad folder for all files, then sort by date and you can spot the one just changed.

I am still on LT97! not sure if I can set up that pen table, I can just move ir rename my aclt4.cfg file and change it around when needs be.

I sometimes put cad files in word docs and some printers would print extremely thin lines. Word does not like PDFs dumped in though. I just open the PDF in photoshop at 300dpi, then save as a jpg and drop into word. Works fine so far.