How to make everything in a block color BLACK

[johnw]

How would I change a block and all nested blocks or entities to turn to color BLACK? I want to overlay a block with all black linework on top of another drawing to see the differences. The command would also have to put the block "in front" of the objects below or stop the "auto-refresh" screen feature. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

John W.

[dbroad]

What you should be asking yourself is why you need such a program?  Setting everything in a drawing to color 7 is insane.  Use a proper plot style instead.  If you want to see things black on white on the display, not just on paper, pagesetup can be used to display the plotstyles on the screen.   The best colors to use inside blocks are bylayer and byblock.  There is a built-in command that works well:

Setbylayer.

[johnw]

I guess I wasn't clear enough in my original post. The "Black" block would be temporary and only used as an 'temporary overlay'. I want to create a block of a floor plan and have all items turn black, then place that block on my foundation plan. Doing so would "hide" all the plumbing and wall edges below. That way if a plumbing fixture was in the wrong place it would still be visible. My model space background would still be black. I do not use a white background.

[Kent1Cooper]

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@Anonymous wrote:

.... I want to create a block of a floor plan and have all items turn black, then place that block on my foundation plan. Doing so would "hide" all the plumbing and wall edges below. .... My model space background would still be black. ....

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Since the color "black" is the same as "white" [color 7], if you use a black background, anything that's color 7 will show up as white.  You would need to use a nearly-black color such as 250 [pretty close but still dimly visible], or some TrueColor option if you want it even closer to the background color.

Do a Search for converting everything in Blocks to Layer 0.  There are some threads here about that, including some that also do it to everything in nested Blocks as well as the top-level objects.  Such a routine could easily be adjusted to make everything a given color instead.

BUT be careful of the possibility that some Block name in your blankout overlay will also be used in the drawing you're laying it over, as an element that you want to remain more visible.  That would mean you wouldn't notice any such Block that's out of place, because its definition would be blackened as part of the blackening of everything in the overlay Block.  To avoid that possibility, do the all-blackish conversion in a separate drawing file, rather than as a Block, and Xref it as an overlay, rather than Inserting it, so that the Xref-dependent Block will be independent of the native Block.

[johnw]

Thanks for the tips and advice Kent! I will indeed be careful.

[dbroad]

Thanks for the further explanation.  In addition to what Kent said, the Autocad Architecture and MEP verticals have drawing compare features and anchoring mechanisms to keep misplaced plumbing fixtures from happening.

If you are using xrefs and if everything is set to display bylayer or byblock, then much of what you want can be done by just setting xref layers (as a group) to a dark color and using draworder to bring the xref to the front.  This should not require parsing the blocks except to set everthing bylayer.