Plotting problem. Filled shape should be gray. Coming out BLACK.

[doni49]

I have a hatch object (solid fill) and a polyline that are both assigned to color 254. I have another solid fill hatch pattern/polyline that are both assigned to color 14.

The ctb file that we use says that color 254 should "Use Object Color" which means that it should plot very light gray.

The same ctb file says that color 14 should be black but 30% screen.

Yet when I plot this drawing out, it's ALL black. Just to be sure, I placed a pc of text using a TTF font (so that it would show up. I then used the Painter command to make the text use the same properties as the first hatch object.

When I plot, the text DOES come out gray but both hatches and both plines are black.

I'm attaching an image file. This is a screen shot taken from my print preview window.

[doni49]

I wanted to eliminate the possibility that the SID image was somehow causing this.  So I turned it off (Unload in the IMAGE/XRef dialog) and tried again.

No joy.  Here's a screenshot of what the print preview looks like with the image turned off.

[doni49 · Accepted solution]

Ok.  I've continued to troubleshoot this some more.  I noticed that the color 14 elements are showing as gray on my screen.  Color 14 is SUPPOSED to display on screen as a dark red but plot as a screened black. Well no matter what, it's displaying as gray on my screen.  So I think *that's* where the issue lies -- it's not seeing the right colors for these elements.

Having done that, I decided to recreate the boundary shapes and then recreate the hatch objects.  But I didn't want to complete draw them from scratch.

So I moved them one shape at a time off to the side to where there would not be any conflicts and I used the BPOLY command to create a new pline.  Then I moved the new pline back in to place.  It was keeping the proper colors.  So then I created the hatch patterns using the appropriate boundary objects.  Now when I plot it looks fine.