Color Wheel

You know how it goes – looks great on the screen, plots as a black mass. You could tweak your plot settings for a month – or you could plot the color wheel.

AutoCAD has shipped with a color wheel since the beginning of time. If you’re not careful, you’ll lose hours wondering why your fill patterns don’t plot properly only to find the issue is with your device, not AutoCAD.

In the example below I’ve plotted a school district over a city map to compare to surrounding county data; effectively 3 layers of information that need to be displayed transparently over one another.

I plotted it, it was a black mass. When this happens, open the color wheel, plot it using the out of the box acad.ctb, and see how the plotter reacts. Then adjust your layer colors or .ctb accordingly.

My laserjet doesn’t care what I send to it, it has a mind of its own. It doesn’t care what AutoCAD sends to it, it doesn’t care what driver I use. Red plots as a light fill pattern, green is darker, no way around it. You can tweak dithering, greyscale, and pen settings all day, and you may find the answer eventually. But by plotting the color wheel first, you’ll find how your printer or plotter wants to respond to AutoCAD without investing a lot of time.

This obviously leads to another gem: Creating a transparent fill pattern in Civil 3D. Create a polyline around the area, export it as an sdf or a shapefile, connect to it, stylize it, make it transparent – and it eats very little memory.

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