Original Tip Date: Oct. 3, 2003
For historic reasons, MicroStation does not use the same logic for automatic white-to-black conversion when printing as it does for view display. Only color indices 0 and 7 are converted from white to black when printing, and only if the print background color is white. This behavior allows the traditional workflow of printing white masking objects using any other color index.
You can change the default behavior using the MS_PLT_INVERT_WHITE_COLORS configuration variable. For example, the value 0-254 will cause printing to behave like view display on a white background.
For a brief period, MicroStation only inverted color index 7 if the file format was DWG or had originally been created as DWG, but that proved unworkable as files were converted back and forth between formats. So, by default, now it's 0 and 7 regardless of the file format.
AskInga Tip #308