A site plan that plots as a black band at 1:200
A 1:200 site plan sits in a viewport on an A1 layout. The AR-SAND paving hatch looks correct when zoomed in close in model space, but plots as a solid black band in the PDF. Every lineweight in the PDF looks like the same hairline. The printed sheet measures about 420 × 297 mm even though the title block is drawn at 841 × 594. The page setup uses monochrome.ctb and Fit to paper is checked. The client wants an A1 PDF at 1:200 with a title block a scale rule can be laid against.
1. Why does the hatch plot solid, and what would you change - including the cases where simply raising the hatch scale will not work?
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Cause. The pattern is too dense for the plotted scale. AR-SAND at a hatch scale of 1 in a millimetre drawing has a spacing of roughly a millimetre; through a 1:200 viewport, 200 repeats are compressed into each plotted millimetre and the lines merge into a tone. Zoomed in you see pattern; at plot resolution you see fill. Nothing is corrupt.
Fix. Raise the hatch scale by the viewport's scale factor - around 200 - and judge the result in plot preview or a PDF, never in model space at working zoom.
When that fails.
- One model-space hatch serves every viewport. If a 1:200 overview and a 1:20 detail share it, you cannot satisfy both with one scale: make the hatch annotative, or split it into separate hatches on separate layers with VP Freeze per viewport.
- A pattern dense enough to exceed HPMAXLINES will refuse to draw rather than fail silently. If the hatch vanishes after you change the scale, check that limit before assuming the boundary broke.
- If the hatch boundary is non-associative, confirm the hatch still fills after any boundary edit, and re-create it associatively.
2. Everything plots hairline. Work through the causes in a sensible order and say where you would fix it so it stays fixed.
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Not the cause: LWDISPLAY. That variable only affects the screen, and toggling it will not change a PDF.
Check, in order.
- Page setup: Plot with plot styles must be on, or monochrome.ctb is not applied at all.
- monochrome.ctb's Lineweight column. If most colours map to 0.00 mm or to Use object lineweight while layers still sit at Default, there is nothing thick to plot.
- Plot object lineweights in Plot Options. Off means object and layer lineweights are ignored entirely.
- The layers themselves: do they carry 0.25 / 0.35 / 0.50 rather than Default, and are the objects ByLayer? Object-level lineweight overrides punch through the layer standard and will undo your table work.
Where to fix it. At the layer and plot-style level, so it holds for all 14 sheets and the next revision. Then re-plot and measure on paper: text-weight and heavy wall lines should differ by at least two steps.
3. The sheet came out at A3 proportions. Explain what Fit to paper did and put the page setup right, including what you would lock down.
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What Fit to paper did. It rescales the layout to whatever the plotter can produce, so an 841 × 594 title block came out near half size and every measurable element on the sheet became meaningless. It also changed the effective scale of everything inside the viewports: the plan is no longer 1:200 in any useful sense, which is why the hatch and text sizes will look wrong even after you fix them individually.
The setup. Paper size A1; plot area Layout (use Extents only if the layout is clean); plot scale 1:1; centre the plot; Fit to paper off. If the sheet will not fit those settings, the paper size or the plotter margins are wrong - the scale is not the variable to bend.
Lock it down. Save the page setup into the layout and into the template, and apply the same named page setup to all sheet layouts. Preview once and check a printed dimension against a scale rule before releasing the PDF, and confirm the PDF page size in the viewer's document properties - a correct plot scaled by a viewer's print dialog undoes all of this.