Plotting an element twice?

Question

When we plot yellow elements, we need to print it in black first and then yellow so that there's a yellow highlight, but it's still legible. We do this with shapes and text. 
 To do this today, we add a reference of our dgn and the plotting rules will only look at yellow elements to give us our two different rules for one shape. 
 Is there a better way to do this? If we didn't have to add the reference we could plot in 1/3 the time, which is significant when we have hundreds of drawings that need to be plotted. 
 I'm open to any ideas!

Jose Pinho · Answer

Ryan,

I believe Robert was pointing you in the right way, to use two references of the same. Not level copy. This is a nice option. With overrides you can have different color, weight and linestyle of the same element. After you have to verify the reference sequences.

Are they 3d files? If it's time consuming, have you check the various ways to place references? Namely cached?

Since many years I've dropped the color yellow from my drawing. In fact we used to do that for yellow/red drawings but it was very hard to see this color, so now we use red/green which the print output gives us the colour black in the mix. When the use of yellow is required we use a custom dark yellow one.

Regards

Lorys · Answer

Unknown said: 
 Ryan, I believe Robert was pointing you in the right way, to use two references of the same. Not level copy. This is a nice option. With overrides you can have different color, weight and linestyle of the same element. After you have to verify the reference sequences. Are they 3d files? If it's time consuming, have you check the various ways to place references? Namely cached? Since many years I've dropped the color yellow from my drawing. In fact we used to do that for yellow/red drawings but it was very hard to see this color, so now we use red/green which the print output gives us the colour black in the mix. When the use of yellow is required we use a custom dark yellow one. Regards

There are a couple of ways that you can use to speed up the process 
 1st way Jose has hinted 
 how I would do it.. 
 Draw per normal using your yellow for text and shapes etc, create a pentable ( call it yellow_halo.tbl) and tell it to resymbolise all objects that use the yellow by its colour number ( some place customise the colour table pallet) and change the out put to a duller yellow I found a dirty yellow or Gold works best for text on paper... 
 Now copy and edit your common or used printer.pltcfg ie assume its the pdf one change its name to YellowHalo.pltcfg and edit it to chose the halo pentable you made earlier ..Now train everyone when to use it .... 
 To find the best colour there is a macro floating around to plot all the RGB swatches ( if you really cant find it PM me and I'll find it in my archives and post it again) you can get a rgb value to put manually in the pen table especially if you have a acad colour you know works better for you ... 
 
 2nd way 
 This works best for text only , create custom text style for yellow text set it to be black text and have a background colour set to yellow in your text style set it to 20% of the text size ie 2mm text = 0.4 off set x and y works very well and set the out line and fill to both to be yellow the same colour number...then you dont need the dirty yellow and can use the bright yellow.. acts like a highlighter has been run over your black text.. 
 
 the first way is best for existing drawings and quick prints as you dont change anything just use a custom printer and custom pentable attached...