Color-to-Lineweight Plotting Program for AutoCAD® Software

Color printing has always been a more costly way of producing materials than black and white printing. Many offices do not have color printers as easily accessible nor in the number that they have black and white printers. The construction industry has recognized this and has created a scaled grayscale Industry Standard format with distinguishable lineweights instead of distinguishing with color in Autocad construction drawings. Currently, this color-to-lineweight process uses a manual conversion of an Autocad file to printable black and white drawing with lineweights. It is a complex and time consuming process consisting of more than 15 steps.

Programmers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory have developed a program that automates the conversion process to just a few mouse clicks. The process is menu driven using a series of scripts and functions that allows users to specify plotting output. By using a set of plot-style table assignments, this program is able to convert Autocad layer colors to different lineweight and screening properties. Each color is mapped to a grayscale value with a specific lineweight thickness. To help facilitate the automation, the user is prompted to select a plotter/printer, sheet size and scale, and the number of copies to be printed. Based on these selections, the program populates all the necessary values in Autocad's plotting routine.

Type of Offer: Licensing



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