I have a couple of questions about dashed lines in the block schematic drawing:

1)  When using a dashed line in a block schematic drawing, the size of each dash is very small, resulting in a line that almost appears to be solid.  Is there a way to increase the scale of the dashes without also increasing the line thickness?  In AutoCAD this would be achieved by increasing the "linetype scale".

2)  When using the monochrome printing method, I can't get dashed lines (or even solid lines) to print in anything other than full dark black color.  I tried changing the line's color to a gray which looks good on screen, but monochrome printing overrides that and it prints as dark black.  I even tried setting the line to an ARGB color with a 50% opacity (ARGB color value 128, 0, 0, 0) but again the monochrome printing ignores the opacity and it prints as a dark black line.

Hoping you have some suggestions.  Thanks.

Thanks for your questions.

1. Unfortunately there are no user controls over dashed line styles/scaling.  The dashed line styles are provided by Windows and the way they appear depends on many factors, especially the 'device' scaling i.e. how the world-space dash style is converted to device space, being the screen or printed output, at the current zoom/scale.  This means that what you see on screen will differ from what you see in print, because of the way Windows interprets the dashes at different zooms in pixels vs print output.

2. Monochrome printing means one color: black. I think you are misinterpreting 'monochrome' to mean 'grayscale' (being shades of grey from black to white) but with a monochrome setting any and all non-white colors convert to black.  If you want grayscale printing you should be able to use your printer settings to achieve this.


Kind regards,
Rob Robinson
Stardraw.com

+x

 

Rob Robinson - 8/14/2025 8:40:35 PM

Thanks for your questions.

1. Unfortunately there are no user controls over dashed line styles/scaling.  The dashed line styles are provided by Windows and the way they appear depends on many factors, especially the 'device' scaling i.e. how the world-space dash style is converted to device space, being the screen or printed output, at the current zoom/scale.  This means that what you see on screen will differ from what you see in print, because of the way Windows interprets the dashes at different zooms in pixels vs print output.

2. Monochrome printing means one color: black. I think you are misinterpreting 'monochrome' to mean 'grayscale' (being shades of grey from black to white) but with a monochrome setting any and all non-white colors convert to black.  If you want grayscale printing you should be able to use your printer settings to achieve this.

Thanks for the quick response.  It's unfortunate there's no user control of the dashed lines.  Would be a helpful addition in the future.  I think what's tripping me up with the monochrome printing option is that I saw in your documentation that images are converted to grayscale when monochrome is selected.  I was hoping that would be the case for other objects.  AutoCAD is able to still plot transparency even when using a monochrome plot style, but it appears that Stardraw discards the ARGB opacity settings in monochrome printing.  When I say "print" I'm actually printing to create a PDF with CutePDF.  Do you know of a way to force grayscale when printing to the PDF format?  Thanks