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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.
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
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.