Change background screen colours in paper space
Hi. I'm new from another CAD. How do I change the background screen colours in paper space? The default is grey in general and white for the plot area but this makes it hard to see my line colours as they suit a darker background. Thanks.
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Easy, Options, Display, scroll down to Paper Space background color.
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Thanks Alan. I found it under "Settings/Program options/Display". I also had to uncheck "Display paper background" further down that menu.
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quote: "I also had to uncheck "Display paper background" further down that menu."
And maybe turn on Printable Area, right under that?
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We have a free utility on our website that allows you to toggle your background colours.
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Thank you for that utility. I tried to code my own toggle, but failed, and ended up having to make two different buttons to choose black or white backgrounds.
I am always puzzled why people do anything but white backgrounds. I am guessing they are a company that only prints in b/w, and never in color. Though, to me, color is a very useful thing to have in prints. At least, when working, even if the final output may be in b/w.
On both Model Space and Paperspace, if you choose colors based on anything other than a white background, your color choices won't work when printing on paper. E.g. yellow lines are very visible on a black background, but invisible on white paper.
I often have to deal with drawings from a few companies in South America, where apparently they still use the pen assignments to assign lineweight, and never print in color. However, typically the pen assignment file is NEVER sent. This is a practice from the 80', where you had to have physical pens for each lineweight, And you also needed to do B/W because your blueprint copier needed the black ink.
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Joe,
I too prefer white background, with WYSIWYG color, lineweight, etc. But most people I share .dwg files with insist on colors as lineweight (without sharing their .ctb files, as you said). Their colors only work on a black background, of course. And they usually set up modelspace so that the print-out only works with PSLTSCALE=on, possibly only because they don't know it can be turned off.
It's a problem in paperspace too. In my own files, I always turn on DisplayPlotStyles in all layout tabs, so that with a white background paperspace truly is WYSIWYG, even if you use .ctb mapping. But I find that most people I share files with don't do that — again, maybe only because they don't know it's an option.
So I often toggle background color between black and white, in modelspace and/or paperspace. The attached custom command BB does that. It ignores any background color other than black or white, treating it as if it were black and therefore toggling it to white. And it works in Bricscad versions older than 20, in case you're still doing that.
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Hi Joe, we have for years used colors 1-8 as black matching the old iso pen thickness, all pens 9-251 are default colors and a pen size of 0.25. The 251+ are shades of grey as default. Yes plotted in color.
We plotted color for our Civil plans, Electricity and gas mains were always color 10 true red, they can kill you, water was blue, you just get wet, sewer was brown/orange, say no more, telecoms same orange. Trees were green and so on. background existing features were set to light grey so new construction in black stood out over the top of "exsiting" line work.
We had like 4 ctb's depending on output for cheap check plots used BW.ctb that was set to all black and was sent to our old A3 Black/white laser printer.
Yes some colors to avoid that did not stand out, like yellow.
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