Plotter settings

I try to use pen#_line_weight because user assigned line widths will be plotted as assigned, unlike the use of pen tables, which over-ride the widths assigned to lines that have line colors over-ridden in the pen table. The alternative is to change line colors to less frequently used ones, change their widths, and leave those colors out of the pen table.

<rant>

The line thickness decision tree is too long and poorly managed. I don't know why every decision by the PTC plotting/visualization group seems to be one that is in the direction of increasing difficulty and decreasing the quality of the output. I suspect it is related to flaws in the detailing group work, but it isn't entirely on detail.

For example, the text font "font" is designed to account for the diameter of the ink pen used to plot it. To simulate this effect in PDF/Postscript one needs to use setlinejoin and setlinecap to both be 1 in the Postscript output. The plotting group has refused to change this, so all the output using the default font 'font' looks like garbage. Then, after more than a decade, PTC specifically added that option to only the direct PDF export.

Who knows what conversations inside PTC led to this fracture of opinion, but they certainly specifically decided to -not- add a config option to duplicate the wet-pen behavior in Postscript output.

I also know PTC specifically decided to not include these options for the entities in Detail; there is no option to set line cap and line join types directly for detail items and have the results of those options show on the screen. This is unlike many other vector drawing tools, especially Postscript, but even the free tool Inkscape, as seen below. The Detail group also decided that displays of hidden line fonts should also have delayed evaluation, leaving it to the Plotting/visualization group, so the Detail user has no control over a crucial aspect of the final appearance of their product.

There's no /rant because it would continue on with the weak spline handling. In contrast, note the node-curvature handles in Inkscape. What is in the diagram is a single path  that has perfectly straight segments and curved segments. The scissors symbol is one of dozens available under the end-point marker selections. While I would not expect PTC to have that wide a variety, even simple arrowheads would help in creating certain symbols. And symbols are a whole separate rant.

All that I've seen work is to have only one place to generate the files, such as Save-As/Export. I just can't see how to get the various methods to sync because they are using different code to do so. The MS_print_manger is the generic Windows interface to plotting, which then devolves into vector (Postscript) and raster forms and is entirely different from the Export method which is designed to build much different information into the PDFs, such as searchable text or TrueType fonts.