Printing a few different colors on b&w plots, Power InRoads V8i

Before you get flamed the protocol or best practice on all these forums is to state the version of mstn your using in the post header  and the verticals ie inroads ,openroads  , connect Edition  etc in the post content  but assuming your using V8i

I think you need to print to colour and create a pentable that prints all colours to black except the colours you want to keep as colour... so where the pentable says colours you put 0-120,125-254 and in the output you change the colour to 0

this means that only colour 121-124 will come out colour  all others will come out black for all element types...

post a copy of your pentable and we can take a look

If this is not something you do often you would probably be better off just using level overrides. Set all levels to a color that you know prints black (Like Color 0) then apply the correct color to the levels you want to print in color.

You could also create a .pltcfg and enable color mapping.

These options are much easier than trying to edit a pen table. While pen tables are easier to maintain than a bunch of .pltcfg files they can be very temperamental until you really learn how to create/modify them. The other 2 options can be used until you get a pen table working correctly should you choose to go that route.

Good suggestions by Lorys and mwlong.

Back when I started working for myself I made an executive decision to draw black lines black, etc., I've always used line weight for thickness, so if I draw a pink line it prints pink, wysiswg they used to call it. Plotter file is set-up accordingly, rarely need a pen table, usually for work by others. Always thought it a bit stupid drawing lines in yellow, cyan, magenta, only to print them black. I was there in the beginning so I get it. If I need to see color to know level, I use level symbology. But if the document is intended to be printed and read in black, draw it that way. Makes CAD life easy, now if we could get the 50 bugs out of Connect

This is everything I've made changes to. From the looks of it, if I do this it will apply to the everything but the references. I unfortunately can't post a picture due to certain system sensitivities. But In the Modify Pen Table dialog I've list all colors but the three that I need in color, then Gone to the second tab and checked colors and set it to black.

Thank you all. We've abandoned this for this submittal due to time constraint and the amount of sheets that would need to be overrode. We will likely use level overrides.

Once you get past your time constraint please check back. There are keyins to run in a batch process to act on a set of files. If you are not able to change reference file settings then it could be a configuration variable that you need to modify to allow that action. Do you use Live Nested files? If not applying and maintaining Level Overrides in sheet files can be very cumbersome. There are a lot of things to consider before committing to a certain method.

For me, it was always easier to modify the color mapping in .pltcfg files.