Joist and Beam Families Show as Hidden Lines with vector Printing

[justinj360]

Our joists and beams are showing as hidden lines when printing with vector. We can use raster printing but some of the lines and halftones are too thin or transparent and don't follow our drafting standards. They show up as hidden lines when printing because in our projects "Show Hidden Lines" has to be set to "All" to display all the families we want to show. Those families include architectural ones from the floor below. The beams and joists are also always shown below the current floor. That much I know.

What I don't know is why they show up as HIDDEN or how to change that line type. I know that it has something to do with the discipline setting because when I set "Show Hidden Lines" to "By Discipline" they print fine. But we need to show ALL hidden lines because we have one architectural window family that we need to show. I either need to find a way to show both structural and architectural disciplines in one view or find a way to make the one window family show up in the structural discipline view as hidden lines

I understand that they're wanting to show as hidden lines because they are below the current level. However, there must be an override or a work around to control what kind of line they actually print as, regardless of if they are underneath the floor or not. 

I tried to be as clear as I could but let me know if something needs to be explained better.

[ToanDN]

If it is just one window then use a plan region to show it and override graphics or linework to make it dashed. Keep the view Hidden line per Discipline, not All.

[awes]

Temporary hide floor?

[justinj360]

I'm sorry I wasn't clear about how many windows there actually are. Unfortunately, there's about 60 per floor. I hadn't thought of that though. Anymore ideas?

[justinj360]

Unfortunately I don't think hiding the floor would work for this because then all the walls that we show on the floor below the current level will look just like the current level's walls. We show walls below as dashed to seperate them.

[MostafaElashmawy]

Do you need them to show as solid lines? or do you need them not to show in the view?

[MostafaElashmawy · Accepted solution]

Anyway, one solution would be to select all the beams in view and override them in view.

-select all elements

-filter the beams only

-override graphics in view by element

-change the projection lines.

[justinj360]

I swear to God I tried that several times before and nothing happened... That was a lot easier than I was making it. I just tried it again and my problem is almost fixed.

We can't manually override the beam and joist projection lines every time for every project. So, I went into Visibility/Graphics Override and adjusted the hidden lines projection lines for structural framing families. However, we show our beams as line weight 6 and joists as line weight 4 to distinguish between them easily. They all appear as the same line weight when printed.

Since there appears to only be one option to adjust the hidden lines for the whole structural framing family category, how can I adjust the hidden lines for beam and joist line weights independently?

[ToanDN · Accepted solution]

Use view filters to differentiate beam and joist functions of structural framing.