No "Plot in Black/White" button?

[marshallw]

Why is there no button in the batch plot / publish command that forces all / selected files to plot n black & white, i.e. override the page setup manager plot style for all / selected files so they will print in monochrome? I would have thought that this particular issue would have been addressed by Autodesk YEARS AGO judging by the amount of discussion group postings that there are on this subject. It is the "BATCH" plot function, after all...

Here is the issue: Files viewed by Engineering need to be in color because the colors mean something to the people who review the designs, but the files to be sent to Manufacturing need to be in black & white. The reason is that many of the "Standard" AutoCAD Mechanical color schemes include YELLOW for slightly critical things like DIMENSIONS and Title Block information. Whoever originally thought up the idea using YELLOW as a standard color for anything printable in AutoCAD needs to re-think their profession.These yelow dimensions prove somewhat difficult to read when printed on white paper. Since the Manufacturing Division does not have black paper to show up the drawing colors properly, the (relatively) obvious solution is to change all colors to black / white when plotting.

All batch plot / publish files for both Engineering plotting and Manufacturing plotting are drawn from the same server locations. The Manufacturing Division manager does NOT have AutoCAD available to make plot style changes, and Engineering is not going to create a seperate set of thousands of files with monochrome CTB styles just for manufacturing plot purposes.

I realize that the problem is that the plot style info is carried in the individual AutoCAD files, but why can't this be temporarily overridden? In other words, why can't the batch plot function in TrueView be forced to temporarily apply an "all colors to black" function like monochrome.ctb/stb during the batch plot process?

By the way, changing the "Plot Style Table Settings"  in the "Options" dialog box to force monochrome.ctb/stb has NO affect - everything still plots in color.

Is Autodesk ever going to address this situation?

Is there ANY workaround for this?

[pendean]

The viewer is AutoCAD without write-abilities: so like AutoCAD, you can use a set of customized "monochrome output" plot style tables with them separate from the AutoCAD workstations.

Ideally, your CAD Manager will need to create a version of the plot styles used at the AutoCAD workstations for the viewer PCs (same name and all), and your viewer PC users will never have to do anything special. Ever.