Drawing colors

Have you ever had an entity on your drawing that you can not change the colour of? Or have you ever added an entity to the drawing and it is an unexpected colour and you can seem to change it to the desired colour?  Then read on.

There are several places you can change the colour of entities and there is a hierarchy which controls which colour is used.

Most of us are familiar with the first 2 but often users are not aware of the third.

1.   System options

Access: Tools-> options-> System Options tab-> Colors section

2.  Layers.

Layers will override system options colours

Access: View-> Toolbars-> Turn on the layer toolbar.

The toolbar indicates which layer is activated so any new entity added will be in this colour.

Click layer properties for the list of layers and their colours.

3.  Line format.

This overrides both System Options Colours and Layer Colours.

This is the one that sometimes eludes users

Access: View-> Toolbars-> Line Format toolbar-> Line Color

You can change the colour of any entity by selecting it and then selecting the colour here.

If you select a colour without any entity selected then new entities created will be in this colour

If you tick default it will use the layer colour or colour in the system options

Also on the Line format toolbar, you will find the Color display mode.  This will switch between the line format colours/layer colours and the system option colours.

Bianca Roberts
Applications Engineer
Central Innovation, Melbourne

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