Making Changes to Multiple Plot Styles

Making Changes to Multiple Plot Styles
Chances are, you’ll want to plot your drawing in black and white for most of your work. You can
edit your color plot style table to plot one or all of your AutoCAD colors as black instead of the
AutoCAD colors.
You saw how you can open the Plot Style Table Editor from the Page Setup dialog box to edit
your color plot style table. In this exercise, you’ll try a different route:
1.
Choose File 
Plot Style Manager to open the Plot Styles window. This is a view to the
Plot
Styles
folder under the
C:\Documents and Settings\
Username
\Application Data\
Autodesk\AutoCAD 2008\R17.1 \enu\
folder.
2.
Locate the file
Mystyle.ctb
, and double-click it to open the Plot Style Table Editor
dialog box.
3.
Click the Form View tab.
4.
Click Color 3 in the Plot Styles list box.

5.
Click the Color drop-down list, and select Black.


6.
Click Save & Close; then, close the Plot Styles window.
7.
Choose View 
Regen All to view your drawing. The green objects appear black in the
Layout tab.
8.
Click the Model tab to view your drawing in Model Space. The objects are still their original
colors. This shows that you haven’t changed the colors of your objects or layers—you’ve
only changed the color of the plotted output.
Next, try changing all the output colors to black:
1.
Repeat steps 1 and 2 of the previous exercise to open the
Mystyle.ctb
file.
2.
Click the Form View tab; then, click Color 1 in the Plot Styles list box.
3.
Shift+click Color 9 in the Plot Styles list box to select all the plot styles from Color 1 to
Color 9.


4.
Click the Color drop-down list, and select Black.
5.
Click Save & Close, and close the Plot Styles window.
6.
Click the Layout1 tab, and then choose View 
Regen All. All the colors have changed
to black.
Now, when you plot your drawing, you’ll get a plot that is composed entirely of black lines.
These exercises have shown that the Plot Style Table Editor lets you set the color of your printed
output to be different from the colors you see in Model Space. In the exercises, you set the pen colors
to black, but if you look down the Color drop-down list, you’ll see that you can choose from any
number of colors. The Select Color option in the Color drop-down list lets you select colors from the
Select Color dialog box.


NOTE
To see the view shown here, make sure the True Color tab is selected and the HSL option is
selected in the Color Model drop-down list. LT users won’t see a Color Books tab.
In Chapter 5, you were introduced to the Select Color dialog box in the context of selecting colors
for layers. Here, you can use it to assign colors to plot styles. The same three tabs are available:
Index Color, True Color, and Color Books. (LT users won’t see the Color Books tab.) The Index
Color tab lets you select from the standard AutoCAD 255 index colors. The True Color tab lets you
choose virtually any color you want. The Color Books tab lets you use PANTONE colors.