coloring areas in a 2d drawing

ACAD is not really intended as a 'rendering' application, especially in 2D. Depending on your printer, you might be able to get something with some very clever and extensive hatching, but I'd suggest picking up another application which can accept vectors from acad but is designed as a graphics program, like CorelDraw e.g., especially if you're going to do this frequently. (You've only got 255 colors in acad, 200 of them crappy.)

Even if you'll only do it once in a while, you could pick up Corel Essentials for under $200 and, using HPGL plt files, you can get vectors into that with a little extra work, and you'll get their bitmap editor as well.

The later versions of AutoCAD do support true color now, so there is no restriction on color choice.

For coloring areas, you will need to make sure the areas are enclosed, and then hatch them using the solid fill pattern, which is available in R14 and later I believe. If you have R2004 or later, you can hatch with a two color gradient fill. Finally, if you have express tools loaded, you can use the superhatch command, which can fill an enclosed area with tiled bitmap images. Bear in mind that AutoCAD *still* is not really a presentation program so all the above methods are not without their limitations.

LT

Autocad 2005 added gradient fills for hatching which is nice, still not the same as a presentation package, but better.

-TIm

Many thanks for your suggestions I was very suprised that i could easily colour areas, as i had bought a cheap colour plotter thanks again leon