Forums >> Revit Building >> Technical Support >> Print color lines in Black

LRK4Revit

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Joined: Wed, Aug 1, 2007
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Revit 2008

Is there a way to set certain colored lines or line styles in Revit to print in black even though they appear in color?

We are using gray "lines" in most of our filled regions and materials for display when materials are cut through.  We also set up line styles that we use to draw 2-D details/components with a dark purple color.  The intent of the colored lines is so you can see in an given view what items are 3-D (modeled) and what items are 2-D (drafted).  This helps tremendously in wall sections, where half the drawing is modeled objects and half the drawing is detail components.  We are printing to PDF and using Kip software to convert PDF's and send to our plotters.

The problem is when we print with Grayscale or Color lines, the dark purple lines convert to dark gray lines.  When we print with Black and White lines, the dark purple lines show up as black, but so do the gray "hatches".

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rkitect

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Joined: Thu, Dec 16, 2004
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Try turning  Lines to halftone in the View Graphics.  Not sure about the Surface patterns.  You could try using graphic overides in the object styles dialogue, but I'm not sure that would work for printing in Black mode.

Let us know what you find.

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Carl - rkitecsure[at]gmail.com

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LRK4Revit

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This is what I found:

Halftones only work for Categories - Materials are not a Category, not enough control, Filtering was too complicated.  Halftone works to get shaded lines when printing Black lines, but color lines do not. 

Printing in Grayscale allows for lines to be grayed or half toned based on the darkness of the color used - darker looking colors print closer to black using Grayscale.  The purple color we are using actually prints a very dark gray - so dark it looks black - when printing Grayscale.  We are also using 2 gray tones to get our shading - a 25% and 50% gray.

When using color to differentiate objects (we use to differentiate 2D from 3D) and using color/gray to display shades, I recommend printing in Grayscale.  I also recommend printing samples to help in selecting your "colors" that should print black or gray.  I attached 3 PDF's that show how each setting worked for me.  The color PDF is what the Revit screen looks like.

Let me know your thoughts.

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