My material symbols for many of my sand soils use the sand02 tile, which is small random dots. These dots do not show up well on several printers we use (Canon laser printers), or when printing to PDF and then sending the PDF to either of the Canon printers. They do show up OK on 1 printer (an HP laser printer), and they look OK on screen in a PDF. Actually lines and everything else seem thicker/darker on the HP. This is true for logs and for fences. The problem is especially bad when the symbol has something else with the dots, such as vertical or diagonal lines indicating silt or clay.
Does this seem to be a printer issue or is there something I can easily change in gINT to make the dots bigger? I notice that in the tile, the dots are actually small circles with white on the inside. Can I fill these circles in?
Thanks for your help.
You can change the sand tile in your sandy soil symbols from SAND02 to a different tile. You may get a more-consistent output from all your printers with a triangular rather than a round sand "dot". (SAND40, the PA DOT Sand tile, is one such - it is available from the gINT Symbol Library on the WIKI if you do not already have it in your own library.)
If that does not help, you can open the SYMBOL DESIGN application SAND02 tile, and use File>Copy Page to copy the tile to a new tile (maybe named SAND-DARK). Then simply select each of the unfilled circles in the tile, and change the entity properties to make the line weight thicker:
As you can see from the Preview, changing just a few of the sand dots' line weights from the default (0.007 in) to 0.021 in makes them "pop":
Thanks, Pat. This worked for all of my symbols that used the sand02 tile. However, I have some symbols that use other tiles which are designed in metric units, e.g. the tile is 3mm x 12 mm. I need to make dots thicker in these tiles also, and apparently the "Thickness" property for the dot is also in mm, because putting in 0.014 or 0.021 does not make the dots thicker or change anything. What is the default Thickness in metric? 0.18 mm?
Thanks again.
This blog discusses how to set the default Unspecified Point Thickness in System Properties.
www.datgel.com/.../4-recommended-system-properties-settings-for-gint-v8i-ss1-083003xx.aspx
The properties Unspecified Line Thickness (inches) and Unspecified Point Thickness (inches) should be set by default, but a few years this defect was introduced.
Phil WadeDatgelBentley Channel Partner and Developer PartnerE: phil.wade@datgel.com | T: +61 2 8202 8600 & +65 6631 9780
Get the most out of gINT with Datgel Tools.
Hi Phil. Thank you for reporting the blank Unspecified Line and Point Thickness properties. Update: Defaults for these properties will be added in the SELECTseries 2 release, due out towards the end of the year.