Line weights in Creo 2

[amansfield]

We recently updated to Creo 2 from WF4 and amongst the many things that have changed, it appears that plotting drawings completely ignores the width of the line and uses a single line weight for all entites of the same color.

I had a conversation with PTC tech support and they said it was intended behavior.

The biggest issue is that the geometry color (ie. white) is the same as our drawing border color and we have used the line thickness to make the border thicker and the geometry thinner

We have drawing borders that we've been using since the stone age and I'm not looking forward to the possiblitiy of having to change these to something else. If I make the pen setting thinner, the border is too thin and if I make it heavy, the geometry edges get too thick and blobby, obscuring finer details and creating thick areas of black around close spaced lines.

I've experimented with changing component colors in views that have a lot of detail, but this is a nuisance in most cases and was unecessary in WF4.

I'm hoping someone has explored this and can give me some guidance as to how to handle it. I've looked for options to control this but haven't found anything. I'd like to have finer control over the line weights, like we've always had in the past.

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[davehaigh]

This is not new behavior. It all depends on if you are using a pen table file or not.

With a pen table file, no line thickness. Set thickness is ignored.
With pen1_line_weight in the config.pro you get line thickness. Set thickness is honored.

See this article from PTC.

[RonGrabau]

I agree with David on this subject. He has a lot of good information. What I also found in my implementation is that over the years there were a number of formats that did not have consistent line types. This became apparent when some of my format lines did not change colors when converting to the new color scheme in Creo 2. It seems that some lines were created with a user defined font and color. On the screen they look the same in Wildfire 4.0 but not in Creo 2.0. To fix the problem, all I had to do was change the fonts to the standard object line, witness line and so forth. Perhaps you might have the same issue if David's suggestions don't help.

Ronald B. Grabau
HP PDE-IT
Roseville, CA
916-785-3298
-<">mailto:->

[amansfield]

Interesting..

We had 4 pen#_line_weight settings in our old WF4 config.pro that had been there for years.

I disabled them as it states that they are for electrostatic plotters. We have used a pen table file and these other settings as well, so I always figured that the pen table was overriding them.

Could I assume that pens that didn't have a pen#_line_weight used the pen table and the others didn't? This might explain why things have worked the way they have.

Great stuff: thanks for the info.

In Reply to David Haigh:

This is not new behavior. It all depends on if you are using a pen table file or not.

With a pen table file, no line thickness. Set thickness is ignored.
With pen1_line_weight in the config.pro you get line thickness. Set thickness is honored.

See this article from PTC.
http://www.imakenews.com/ptcexpress/e_article000466459.cfm?x=b5M7rGw,emileerose@cadwire.net,w

Or see my ProE Admin 101 talk from 2010 PTCUser conference. Page 52 and following.
http://portal.ptcuser.org/p/do/sd/sid=1144&type=0
There are 71 pages to the powerpoint and a few movie files. Down load all the files and unzip them in the same directory so Powerpoint can find them. You need to view the presentation as a slide show. If you print it out to read, you will have a lot of graphics overlapping the text. There are links in the slide show to various files. There is also good information in the notes for each slide. So you will want to check out the notes view also.
David Haigh

[kimndave9]

If there are questions about HPGL, HPGL/2, or Postscript , drop a
question. I have the Draftmaster (HPGL) and HPGL/2-RTL manuals from HP
and the programmer's manuals from Adobe. I also have some experience at
debugging and repurposing Postscript output to mirror, rotate, rescale,
overlay, invert, et al.

Dave S.

<rant>
PTC's handling of line thickness/weight/width has been clumsy for a long
time. Like since rev 13.

The order should be:

lowest priority:
software default
pen#
pen table
user alteration of linestyle
Highest priority

Plotted line weights should be in plotted scale - 1 inch wide line
plotted at 1/8th scale should be .125 inches wide.

Instead, the order is:
software default
pen#
user alteration of line style
pen table over-rides user alteration selections.

Plotted weights are full size regardless of plotted scale. A one inch
line on the drawing is plotted one inch wide on a 1/8th scale drawing.
Not what one would like.

<fond memory="> When the only device for fast plotting was a DEC LN03, I
created a pnt called thin_print so that D, E, and J size drawings
printed to A-size were still legible, making sure that the lines were
smaller than the hardware minimum so that the DEC Postscript interpreter
would force them to the smallest dot (1/300) inch to account for this
problem. </fond>

I wonder what the software requirements group wrote to govern these
outcomes.

Wouldn't a config option - pen_table_overrides_all = yes/no been better?

The output interface group, or whoever is in charge of converting the
internal models and drawings into viewable output has not done so good a
job as one would expect from software that is otherwise quite good.

For example: It is considered poor practice to compile potentially
variable information into software. Example: Postscript headers and
footers. Were these external files, spec'ed by plot config (pcf), one
could easily create watermarked output. One could also repair the
setlinecap and setline join options to represent what most CAD users
expect, capital I the same height as capital E - including those who
created the default font in the Detail module. These options also affect
any Postscript stroked fonts.

Why care about Postscript when PDF is available? Because Postscript
contains the original commands while PDF is a compiled result. It's easy
to create a write white-on-black with write black-on-white combined
decal using Postscript, but not easy at all with PDF output. It's
cleaner to convert Postscript from one vector format to another when the
arcs have center coordinates. Finally, because Postscript can be down
converted to PDF, but conversion from PDF to Postscript cannot recover
the original Postscript - no round trip. </rant>

[dgallup]

IMHO, PTC has always given the drawing mode and the plotted output very little importance. They didn't even include a detailing package for quite a few years & about 8 releases. Their position was that there were other highly developed drafting packages like AutoMAD so why should they bother. Of course, having to export geometry every time there was a change completely broke the parametric part/assy/drawing paradigm. In more recent years the buzz around model based design has given PTC another excuse to ignore the drawing end of their software.

In Reply to David Schenken:

Dave S.

<rant>

I wonder what the software requirements group wrote to govern these
outcomes.

Wouldn't a config option - pen_table_overrides_all = yes/no been better?

The output interface group, or whoever is in charge of converting the
internal models and drawings into viewable output has not done so good a
job as one would expect from software that is otherwise quite good.

</rant>

PTC quality philosophy: We've upped our quality standards. Up yours.