Objects appear fat

[Anonymous]

There is a client that I am sending Autocad Architectural 2015 drawing files to. When she receives them all the objects and text appear "fat". Basically it appears that everything is set to a width of 4" instead of 0. Is it a setting on her end or is there a setting I need to change prior to sending CAD files?

Any help would appreciated.

Thank you.

Kory Skoog

CADD Technician

[pendean]

Turn off LWEIGHT perhaps.

[Richard.Vivanco]

Review your key layer and change line weight too

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Thank you for your help. I did an etransmit for the file and that seemed to solve whatever the issue was.

Kory Skoog

CADD Technician

[beyhantrock]

Finally found the answer to this hellish problem! I've always used CTB plotstyles, meaning that my line weights are based on colors. I thought that I could use two colors on one layer (thick pen for walls, thin pen for text, for example) to reduce the number of layers I need. Apparently, even if you choose to change the color of text you put in, CAD will print that text as the main layer color.  Why doesn't AutoCAD just tell you that instead of having this item come up again and again in forums for more than a decade!?! 

[leothebuilder]

CTB color based line weights are old.

STB has been around for a long time now and has is a lot more flexible in my opinion.

[beyhantrock]

Thanks.
CTB's might be old, but so am I!
I'm not switching unless you can show me it's very easy to do so.

[beyhantrock]

Thanks.
CTB's might be old, but so am I!
I'm not switching unless you can show me it's very easy to do so.

[David_W_Koch]

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@beyhantrock wrote:

Finally found the answer to this hellish problem! I've always used CTB plotstyles, meaning that my line weights are based on colors. I thought that I could use two colors on one layer (thick pen for walls, thin pen for text, for example) to reduce the number of layers I need. Apparently, even if you choose to change the color of text you put in, CAD will print that text as the main layer color.  Why doesn't AutoCAD just tell you that instead of having this item come up again and again in forums for more than a decade!?! 

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I am not seeing that here.

What type of font are you using for your text?  Is it an SHX-based font, or a TrueType font?  TrueType fonts are what they are; they do not respond to the assigned lineweight.  SHX-based fonts are affected by lineweight, and I just placed several items of text (old school single-line TEXT and MTEXT) on the same layer in a color-dependent plot style file, changing the colors and assigned a CTB file that has lineweight assigned in the plot style file.  The plot preview shows differing lineweights.  Note, however, in the actual drawing, turning on the display of lineweights does not show these differently on the Model tab, as that is using the lineweight assigned in the drawing, not in the plot style, and those are all set to ByLayer, so they all show the lineweight assigned to the layer.  On a Layout tab, if you check the Display plot styles toggle in the page setup and have the display of lineweights turned on, you will see the lineweights in the drawing.

Does your CTB file assign the lineweights?  If so, then you will only see the different lineweights when plotting, viewing a plot preview or on a layout tab that is set to show plot styles (with the display of lineweight turned on as well).  If your CTB file has each color's lineweight set to use the object lineweight, then the lineweight assigned in the drawing governs, and only changing the color property will have no effect on the lineweight.

[beyhantrock]

Thank for your note. The fat font doesn't show up until I print to PDF.
That's when everything goes to hell. How do I know if my font is TT or SHX?

[dgorsman]

Could you post a screen shot of these "fat fonts" please?  If this is what I'm thinking of, then you've got TrueType fonts.  If the text has a Z/elevation other than zero they can look a bit big/puffy (fat?).  Don't count on using Properties unless you've got precision out to around 8 decimal places; you may need to manually push the Z value to something wrong (say, 1.0) and then back to 0.0.  I've also seen some weirdness when text styles with TTF fonts have a width factor other than 1.0.

[beyhantrock]

Hi again,

I appreciate you writing me back. I dare not hope we'll get to the bottom
of this, but it's nace that you're trying.

My z values are all zero.
And the fat-thing doesn't happen on all text... it seems indiscriminate. In
fact,
But here's a sample and you can see that text randomly gets fat. Look at
the SCALE: 1/4" = 1'-0" lines. Half of the line is fat. And look at the
hatch lines, some are thin, some are fat....

I spend so much time making beautiful drawings and get this mess when I
print them out. This has been going on for years.

Beyhan