Topic Title

This applies to all versions of Datacad.

What I think I know
Colours with lower numbers print before colours with higher numbers.
Layers with lower numbers print before layers with higher numbers.
Pens with Lower numbers print before pens with higher numbers.

What I don't know
Colours, Layers and Pen numbers. What is their printing priority.

Boy this is confusing for me. Its like tring to juggle and pat my head at the same time. There has to be a better way.

This applies to all versions of Datacad.
There has to be a better way.

No there hasn't. All you need to do is understand this way, and that may mean only understanding all you need to understand.

Colours with lower numbers print before colours with higher numbers.

Yes, if they are assigned to pens in numerical order and lowest first, which is the obvious way to do it.

Layers with lower numbers print before layers with higher numbers.

I don't think layers have anything to do with it.

Pens with Lower numbers print before pens with higher numbers.

Yes. Hence in the 20th century, if you wanted to print over toned areas, you used white and red for the tones and assigned them to pens 1 & 2. You can now do this with the "print bitmaps first" button.

What I don't know
Colours, Layers and Pen numbers. What is their printing priority.

See above. Priority is the same as lower numbers before higher numbers.

The order in which entities are drawn is based on what the Plot Settings are set at. It depends primarily on the Pen Sort option and the WYSIWYG option. The only option that changes these is if Bitmaps and Fills is either Print First or Print Last in the pen table.

The first thing to understand is that all colors are mapped to a pen. Pens 1 through 16 are definable, while Pens 0 & 16 are fixed (0 is non-printing and 16 prints in whatever color is on the screen). Because of this, I don't think color number matters in plotting as I have never seen a difference in plotting based on what color I choose (other than the resulting Pen Number).

If Pen Sort is turned on, then the drawing will print in the order in which the Pens are setup, from 1 through 16. There is a sub-order to this based on layer and then entity, but that is hard to tell or see when the entities are the same color. If you have a Knock-Out, it will knock out any entity with a lower Pen number and then any entity below itself (on a lower layer number or "behind" itself on the same layer).

If Pen Sort is turned off, the the drawing prints in the order in which the entities lay within the visible layers, ignoring Pen Numbers altogether. It will print the lowest layer first and then subsequent layers after that. Within each layer it will print the entities in the order in which they are within that layer. If you have a Knock-Out, it must will knock out anything on all layers below its layer and also any entity behind itself on the same layer.

With Pen Sort turned off, you have the option to turn on WYSIWYG. This option will print the drawing as displayed based on a screen update (I have not tested if this will print exactly what is on the screen if there are any "artifacts"). The difference that this can produce is solely based on what option you have selected under Utility > Display > Layer Order. If you have selected First or Last, then this will have an effect on the plot based on your current active layer. If you have selected In Order the resulting plot should be the same as if both Pen Sort and WYSIWYG were turned off.

If Bitmaps and Fill is selected as either Print First or Print Last, they will be placed either at the beginning or end of the entity print order respectively and then plotted in order according to their layer and entity order within the drawing.

I'll tack something onto this thread, that is related. If I have Dark Gray (which is our non-print color) as a bitmap fill, and I have unchecked "Map fill colors to pen colors" - it still doesn't print. At first, it had an outline also in Dark Gray, and so the outline should not print, but the fill should have. I then tried it without the outline, and it still didn't print. I changed it to Color_21 and I got what I wanted/needed, but something is not right.

Here are a couple of Pen Tables that merge properly:

SAI Pen Table.png (37.42 KiB) Viewed 6699 times

DcadWin Pen Table.png (38.39 KiB) Viewed 6699 times

The latter has a red pen (for revision clouds) first, and then the gray line, and then the thinnest black up to the thickest.

I don't work that way so I don't see it as a problem, but i get the same result. Maybe DataCad makes an exception with non-printing colours.