Hello John,
Thanks for your reply. The classic answer is, "I don't know what I did, but that's what happened!" My particular files aren't really required for this investigation. Anyone should be able to just create their own test file with some overlapping solids or surfaces and play with that. Ultimately, what I am hoping for is behavior that I would consider 'intuitive' surrounding the relationship between Visual Styles and Plotting As Displayed.
As a baseline, look at the way Properties are handled; values for line weight, color, and type, etc. are independent of one another. I can change and object line type without affecting the line weight.
So now, when I go to Visual Styles, and I see controls for the line type and color of Edge and Obscured, and one of the options is By Entity, it makes sense to me that I should be able to control these properties independently of whatever other properties the object might have. In other words, in the absence of any specific override enumerated in the Visual Style settings, the other display properties (such as Transparency, for example) should default to the properties already declared elsewhere for that object.
On the other hand, if I do set an override in a Visual Style (set Obscured line type = Dashed) I expect that only the line type of the underlying object will be changed from its 'native' state. The color, weight, transparency, scale, and every other property should remain unchanged.
So far so good, you can generally play around with the Visual Style settings and get what you want on the display. There are still some problems that I can see; poor to no control of the line scale, and overlapping edges are not 'Overkilled', so obscured faces viewed on edge often appear solid anyway. This last part is a real shame, because View Base seems to handle this so well.
Here is where the trouble really begins: When you set the Shade Plot to As Displayed, in my experience that is not what you get. That is what I was trying to convey in my post, that intuitively, from a user standpoint, plotting 'As Displayed' should come out 'As Displayed', unless additional overrides are put in place during the plot itself. So, if in the plot dialog, if I have a monochrome CTB, and all the settings for all the colors are 'Use object...', except that Color is black, the plot should stay true to the line type, scale, and weight of the display, only the color should change. That is not what I was getting.
I realize that some might find them useful, but personally, raster plots are worthless to me. When I first created this post, I was under the impression that the only way to get a vector plot that shows obscured lines was to use Legacy Hidden. I have since learned that you can also get one by setting the colors in the Hidden Visual Style to black and white. However, this still does not fix the lack of control over the weight and scale of the obscured lines. I regret that I put CTB into the mix of this discussion, I was only using it out of desperation. No more! CTB is a headache in the making. I do not want to go through life paranoid about what the display colors that I choose are going to do to the properties of my plot! Hence my attraction to 'As Displayed'.
Now I know a trick; set the Visual Style colors to black and white, Shade Plot As Displayed, and Plot Style None, you get pretty close to a good plot, but again for the obscured lines; the limited line type choices, the poor line scale control, and the interference caused by faces viewed on edge are all still pretty maddening.
In a perfect world, the software would somehow combine the best parts from each of two approaches; the View Port and the View Base. Each does some things well, and each has problems. View Port = good translation of visible object properties, poor translation of obscured. View Base = poor translation of visible object properties, better translation of obscured (line weight is still lost).
