How can I control the spacing of dashes in phantom, centerline, hidden, and similar lines when exporting a PDF?

[mliszka]

How can I control the spacing of dashes in phantom, centerline, hidden, and similar lines when exporting a PDF? Currently, the spacing is so wide that some non-solid lines look solid in the PDF. I am running Creo 2.0.

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[Mahesh_Sharma]

Mike,

You may try creating pen table and use that for PDF export using config option pdf_use_pentable as yes.

Document for pen table file is available at http://support.ptc.com/cs/cs_24/howto/plt522/plt522.htm

[mliszka]

Mahesh,

I believe a pen table will only control the thickness of lines, not the spacing of the dashes and spaces.

Mike

[Mahesh_Sharma]

Mike,

Yes, pen table will control thickness, this can use to control line pattern as well.

From http://support.ptc.com/cs/cs_24/howto/plt522/plt522.htm#pattern

[mliszka]

Mahesh,

Thank you for pointing me to this resource. After reading it through, I am still a bit unclear on how a pen table would function in certain situations. If you could answer a couple more questions about them, it would help me immensely.

1. It seems as though there is a default pen table for Creo that defines how all the lines look. First of all, is it possible to view this default pen table? If I want a phantom line pattern that is twice as coarse as the default, then I need to know what the default is to begin with in order to determine what the new pattern should be. I'd rather not eyeball it.
2. If I create a user defined pen table and only define a new pattern for pen 3, for example, do all other line widths and patterns stick to the default? Or, do I need to define all pens in the user pen table?
3. Pen 1 covers both of the following entities:
   1. Cross-section cutting plane lines: plot as phantom lines
   2. Centerline line font with white color
4. If I create a user pen table that defines a new pattern for pen 1, how does Creo know whether to use it for phantom lines or center lines?
5. If I open the Modify Line Style dialog, in the Line Font pull-down menu I see the following:
   1. SOLIDFONT
   2. DOTFONT
   3. CTRLFONT
   4. PHANTOMFONT
   5. DASHFONT
   6. CTRLFONT_S_L
   7. CTRLFONT_L_L
   8. CTRLFONT_S_S
   9. DASHFONT_S_S
   10. PHANTOMFONT_S_S
   11. CTRLFONT_MID_L
   12. DOT_CTRL_FONT

     How do I use a pen table to control the attributes all these types of lines here that I don't see in the Default Pen Mapping Table at the link you provided?

Thanks,

Mike

[MartinHanak]

Mike,

see my reply in Re: Axis Line Segment Distance

Martin Hanak

[mliszka]

Martin,

This seems like it should work, but for some reason changing the line_style_length parameter seems to have no effect on the PDF output no matter what I set it to. I see in the video that you can see the result of changing this parameter in the drawing view even before you export the PDF. I don't even get that.

Mike

[MartinHanak]

Mike,

install http://www.screencast-o-matic.com software and made a video showing your actions. I can watch it and check your steps.

You can also upload your testing Creo files.

Martin Hanak

[mliszka]

Martin,

Attached is a video showing the actions I'm taking. Also included are the part and drawing files I used to test with.

Mike

[MartinHanak · Accepted solution]

Mike,

I realized that I used Creo Parametric 2.0 M160 when I created my video. In this version the option line_style_standard CTRLFONT number works well.

Then I tested Creo Parametric 2.0 M070. In this version the option line_style_standard CTRLFONT number does not work! It looks like your Creo Parametric 2.0 M120 has the same problem as M070.

Then I made some investigation and carefully read Axis Display Options  help page. You can find there the following sentence:

Axes that are set to CTRLFONT actually are shown as CTRLFONT_S_L or CTRLFONT_L_L, depending on their orientation.

So I went back to M070 and tried ... line_style_standard CTRLFONT_L_L number ... and it worked!

Please test line_style_standard CTRLFONT_L_L number and let me know .

Martin Hanak

[mliszka]

That did the trick. Thank you so much!

Mike

[BrianSnyder]

Long time lurker, first time poster.  Martin your posts have been invaluable to me over the years.  Please keep it up.

Small correction:  line_style_standard should be line_style_length

Creo's inability to do WYSIWYG for PDF linefonts has been the bane of my existence forever.  The issue I have now is that the on-screen linefont display is very dense.  Is there a way to counteract this?

Here are the options I set for my company (English units):

line_style_length CTRLFONT_S_L 0.25

line_style_length CTRLFONT_L_L 0.25

line_style_length DASHFONT 0.05

line_style_length DOTFONT 0.05

line_style_length PHANTOMFONT 0.25