Plotting Layer Properties vs plot style (ctb, stb)

[Anonymous]

I am trying to set up a system for our Two man Cad department.  I have been in Civil 3d for about 2 years now.  I have been plotting using .ctb and setting lineweights thru there.  However, I am finding some disadvantages in doing that.  What is the general practice at Civil Engineering Consulting firms when plotting?  I feel like using the object lineweight through the layer manager seems like a good practice.  Just looking for some input here.  Thanks In Advance!

-Jon

Civil 3d 2015

intel core i5

8gb ram

[rkmcswain]

I can't speak for what is "the general practice at Civil Engineering Consulting firms", but I've never used anything other than CTB files, going on 21 years now.

I only occasionally run into STB drawings, like once a year maybe.

[tcorey]

Whichever way you find 'most' users do this (I think it's gonna be through the CTB) don't forget that you can also set lineweights for Civil 3D objects through their styles.

Personally, I do whatever I think is going to keep me away from using the layer dialog. I just find it sooooo time-consuming. With over two hundred layers in the supplied templates, it is just unwieldy.

[Anonymous]

So Keeping the CTB plot style and assigning black to all colors and having a lineweight assinged to all colors is a pretty typical way to go to plot then?

In school we never used that, it was always set up your layermanager and use object lineweights for each layer. I would think that you have more options when you use the CTB plot style but then use plot object lineweight instead of assigning a lineweight to each color... hopefully i am making sense here...

[Anonymous]

I Guess my question should have been, when using a CTB plot style do most assign lineweights to each color, or do you use use object lineweight?

[rkmcswain]

Yellow600 wrote:

I Guess my question should have been, when using a CTB plot style do most assign lineweights to each color, or do you use use object lineweight?

The former. We experimented around with doing both (to get a visual in MS of the lineweights, if needed) - but it proved to have little value.

[AllenJessup]

I got tired of hearing excuses of the lineweight being wrong because a users "couldn't see a color on the screen" so they changed it "Temporarily" and forgot to change it. So I revised (almost) everything to Lineweight set to "Use object lineweight".

I set the lineweights for each layer in the Template.

[Jay_B]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I feel like using the object lineweight through the layer manager seems like a good practice.

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Jon,

I've always used ctb's but my preferred method is a ctb file with the "use object lineweight" property controlling the

lineweights bylayer in Layer Manager.

At my previous employer we weighed the pros / cons of ctb vs. stb & decided to go with ctb using the lineweights.

This setup is very flexible and makes it very easy to tweak plots when needed without having to choose a color you

didn't want etc. in a locked down environment.

Edit: I think there's an echo in here, @tcorey allready said that.

[Anonymous]

Yeah that is the way i figured most people worked with it. Our survey dept. currently sets lineweights to each color and I don't care for it. If i have objects on the screen and show lineweight it isn't what will print.

[troma]

I never show lineweights on screen.

In school, and in my first CAD job in a medical product manufacturing plant, we always set the lineweight by the layer, and plotted with monochrome.ctb. Here in my current job we get base mapping CAD files (from aerial photography/photogrammetry, possibly via microstation) and they are set up with each object having it's own lineweight, and they also plot quite well with monochrome.ctb, but we run a laytrans on them to get them to our standard layers anyway.

So our standard is like others to plot with .ctb, all colours assigned to black and with different lineweights.

I would recommend that if you have a survey department with existing CAD standards that you try very hard to use as many of their standards as possible. There is no point reinventing the wheel when you have something that works. Competing standards in one company are a terrible time waster.

[Anonymous]

Our Survey Dept. Is way behind the times...I'd like to mention I do work for a city. They don't even use annotative text which drives me CRAZY or layout tabs, they still print out of model.
I figured that was an old school method using ctb with assigned line weights to each color. I figure it wouldn't hurt our engineering dept to use (Object line weight). I feel it would work a lot better and would give us more options instead of being locked in on color choices. Thanks for your input!

[Jay_B]

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@Anonymous wrote:
I feel it would work a lot better and would give us more options instead of being locked in on color choices.

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Another thing to consider when setting up the ctb for colors is to block out a ranges of colors such as 1-10 for the day to day black & greyscale colors.

Then apply these colors as the normal b&w plan output items in a typical plan set.

The majority of the other pen #'s are available as their ootb colors which makes it very easy to do exhibits and such where some color needs to be added to day to day plots.

Also eases the project transition from preliminary (color) to final which tends to be more b&w.

[Pointdump]

Jon,

OK, my personal opinion here:

I think CTB's and STB's are a needless and torturous complication, barbaric relics of the past that deserve to be kicked to the curb and chucked under the bus.

Dave

[Anonymous]

Ahh... Okay I guess.....

[MikeEvansUK]

Exactly what I do: I have only ever used CTB settings. Colours 1-11 always black and white, 250-255 greyscales.

All others either colour or black/white depending on selected ctb file. Each pen size is set by colour. 0 = 0.5, 1 = 1.8,2 = 2.5,3 = 3.5,4 = 0.4, 5= 5.0 etc to 9.0.

I have two copies (colour / black) exactly the same apart from everything is 1.8mm lineweight. I Did try lineweights once but got too difficult to standardise and maintain as did the STB format. Pen By Colour seems simpler.

M

[civilman1957]

From what I've seen, the majority of firms do the former - however - we have several clients that assign lineweight to the layers and we've had to adjust our template to plot both ways. In other words, we have a ctb file that uses weight by color, and one that uses lineweight in the layer, and use whichever ctb suits our client.

[Anonymous]

Alot of good response to this thread, thanks everyone!

Side note on the plotting, I use Transparancy for my survey background data behind my design... Is this a common used practice?  Transparancy seems like a useful option.

[AllenJessup]

Transparency is a good option. I use the screening settings in the CTB. But that was set up before transparency. I've just never seen the need to change.

[Jay_B]

Transparency is very useful but can have it's limitations, especially when dealing with rasters & pdf's.

I use transparency mainly for shading color hatches, and screening for the bw output.

See this Knowledge Network article for more info

[rl_jackson]

I do it like Allen & Jay, its way easy and color becomes irrelevant. You always get a consistent plot regardless of color, and you can override the weight through properties or styles if needed.