CREO2 Printing - Colors Printed vs System Colors

[davehaigh]

Another observation regarding printing in color.

I just got a call from a user that is working on legacy drawings we have which have color.

Turns out that the users system colors affect the colors printed.

Wasn't this independent in Wildfire 4?

This is bad, because we can't rely on every user having the same system color file. The printed colors should be independent from the system colors.

Anyone have any insight into this?????

David Haigh
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[davehaigh]

So I verified that the behavior is the same as in Wildfire 4.0.

So here's the problem. These drawings have a lot of datum curves, which define a map. These curves are printing in different colors depending on the system colors.

Is there a way to make these independent of the system colors?

David Haigh

[mdebower]

David,

I can confirm this behavior in Wildfire 5.0 I have had several instances of users with custom syscol.scl files causing dimensions to print out in yellow in color, or a VERY light grey in B&W. Using a PTC supplied color scheme seems to work as workaround.

[cid:image003.png@01CE8EBB.AB383860]

-marc
CAD / PLM Systems Manager
TriMark Corp.

[davehaigh]

I think I found the solution about the same time Ron mentioned user-defined colors.

[cid:image003.png@01CE8EAC.32DFF420]

If you define your curve colors using the "System Colors" they will change depending on the system color file the user has loaded.

If you define the curve colors using the User-defined set, they will stay the same regardless of the system color file.

David Haigh

[TomU]

The same issue occurs when creating PDF files. We solved both of these by customizing the pen table file so all system colors print black and white but anything with a custom color still prints in color.

! This Pen Table will print everything in black and white except
! user defined colors.
pen 1 thickness .001 in;
pen 2 thickness .005 in; color 0 0 0;
pen 3 thickness .003 in; color 0.5 0.5 0.5;
pen 4 thickness .001 in; color 0 0 0;
pen 5 thickness .010 in; color 0 0 0; drawing_color; section_color;
pen 6 thickness .001 in; color 0 0 0; quilt_color; magenta_color; attention_color; curve_color;
pen 7 thickness .001 in; color 0 0 0; datum_color;
pen 8 thickness .001 in; color 0 0 0; dimmed_color;

config.pro option "use_8_plotter_pens" must be set to "yes"

Tom U.

[EricHuffman]

So, I changed the pnt file to specify color 0, 0, 0 for all pens and it looks much better. Shaded views print in full color while all the 2d stuff is black. Thank you David!

However, previously I was able to specify a text color and have it print that color. Yellow (default) text would print black and Red (highlight) text color would print Red. I have tried specifying pen 4 as 255 0 0, changing system colors to default, using a system color, and a user-defined color but nothing will let my red text print red. Except... After going back and forth for a while the only thing that seems to work was making sure that the pen color matches the system color and the text color. For example...if my highlight color (syscol) is 255 0 0 and I specify pen 4 (pnt) as either highlight color or 255 0 0 AND the text is set to highlight color then it will print the red color. If I change my syscol or text color or pen color to anything else it will print black.

This seems silly to me so if you guys find a better solution please let me know.

Eric