[V8i]Custom Linestyle disappears when used on a closed element with an Opaque or Outlined Fill. Why?

Hi Barry,

A workaround is to use the regular linestyle "0" and you can select the lineweight to 10 (or however you wish to determine the line thickness).   This will take care of your issue with the closed element using the Opaque or Outlined fill type.   

I investigated further using my own linestyles and they are working as expected.  I realized yours only used a simple stroke.   So I created one and can see why it is not being honored with the fill type in closed element with using the fill type.  I will investigate further and discuss with the developer about this.  

Thanks,

Connie Wallace

Hi Connie, thanks for responding.

Connie Wallace said:

and you can select the lineweight to 10 (or however you wish to determine the line thickness).   This will take care of your issue with the closed element using the Opaque or Outlined fill type.   

Yeah...... that's just not gonna happen.

The line style was in fact, the first stage of testing a possible adoption of a drastic and unconventional approach to representing line weights and line styles.

By this I mean with the aim to eliminate entirely (where possible and where relevant) the standard line weights options 1-31* and the internal linecodes (line styles) 0-7. *Line weight 0 may still be used but I'm undecided on that

This will probably raise some eyebrows with the obvious question, why?

Well, when watching some YouTube video's recently I saw clearly how Line Weight appears in AutoCAD (and Revit, maybe other applications too??)  and it reminded me that not having an accurate true representation of printed line weight on screen whilst I am drawing, really really annoys me. The values of Line Weights on the attributes toolbar are to all intents and purposes, essentially useless; in reality, all they are is simply a vague indicator of weight and the onus is on the user is to know what it should represent (in terms of print thickness). This illogical scenario is somewhat exacerbated by the Preferences Setting: Line Weight Translation and also whatever the Pen Table settings are. Due to this historical approach to Line Weight, I have always used colours to represent printed line weight. Yes it works fine but sometimes, depending on the scale of a section or detail etc... chosen colours might not be suited to the scale, mistakenly picked (human error perhaps) and the error only noticed when a PDF is made or printed to hard copy. Mistakes are easily made but if the correct weight was visible on screen at all times, it would be noticed immediately.

My approach was to solving this was simple, create a single line style with these settings:

I made it 100m long as you get artefacts with small dash sizes at the stroke ends, and I don't ever draw a line as long as 100m so this eliminates the problem. How I intended to control line weight is simple, I will use 'Line Style Scale' to control width. The above style has a width which represents 1mm, In the customize dialog, I would make custom tools for applying each unique line weight (0.18 | 0.25 | 0.35 | 0.5 | 0.7 | 1.0 | 1.4 | 2.0 etc...) as a scale factor. I could also set weight via the Level Manager or Element Templates but I'm not a fan of either tbh.

What makes all this work is, when the Annotation Scale is Full Size 1=1 the custom line style has thicknesses of the above pen values, but if the Model's Line Style Scale is set to Annotation, assuming I'm drawing a floor plan which I will reference onto a sheet at 1:50, I set the model's Annotation Scale to 1:50, the thickness of a 0.25 line is then immediately scaled up 50 times and now has a measurable thickness of 12.5mm. If I zoom in or out, that onscreen thickness increases or decreases and the same happens for other elements and their assigned weights, its just how things should be (IMO), not stay the same representative thickness on screen at every zoom depth. What use is that to anyone??

I have yet to get into Dashed and other line styles. What I expect is that the position I see a Dash or a Gap on screen, will be the same as when it prints, which is not how it works with linecodes 0-7

As I'm on V8i I don't expect any solution to the issue in my original post, it was posted on the off chance that there is an existing solution that I'm not aware off but which others may know about. I can work around the problem in the original post by creating Hatching, Patterns and Fill Colours in a separate dedicated model, and using the Update Sequence to have the lines be visible above this extra model.

Here's an example of a rectangle drawn with default line style 0 and line weight 20 (Line Style Translation 1.5:1). Big ugly rounded corners are not nice to look at in my opinion:

As an example to what I describe that I have seen in other applications, just look at the quality of the on-screen linework below (and bare in mind, that this is a Youtube screenshot - click on it to view at true size), thin lines of less relevant objects are pin sharp but still visible, thick lines are chunky yet the corners are still sharp (and of course, we should still laugh at Autodesk for continuing to require their users to have to type Regen to fix the display of Circles, arcs etc..) but the point is, wouldn't you rather your linework looked as good as this on screen, I know I do?:

If I had this file as a DGN, used normal line weights and zoomed out, it would look worse.

I'll finish by caveating that I am only in the early stages of testing, but the results I have so far are very promising.