Laser printer line weights

Plotters and printgers used to be worlds apart and there were special settings in programs that used plotters, like Pro/e, to deal with pen line weights. Plotters were pen plotters and had actual pens of certain colors and weights. Line thickness is still being controlled in Pro/e, not with modern GUI designations like bold or extra bold or fine, but by pens and weights.

Internal to Pro/e, it has 8 'pens' available, with line weights in a range from

1to 16. I don't know what the actual measured thickness of 1 or 16 is (the range, that is). But, if you set pen1_line_weight through pen8_line_weight to some number, 3 for example, to test and vary, systematically, you should be able to figure it out.

Additionally, there is a feature available for controlling line weight, style (solid, dashed, dot), angle and color, called a pen.tbl which is a simple ASCII file with values in a format that will tell the interpreter, that for a certain type of line style in the model, print with a certain pattern of lines. The pen.tbl file contains the line pattern definition, including weights, etc. and passes this to the post script interpreter. If you don't need to vary line styles, colors, etc, you may never need a pen.tbl file. Check the Help filles for pen or line weights.

David Janes

Hmm. Maybe PTC thought that since the target market for Pro/E is engineers, pen numbers and line weights would be received better than Family Size ! Jumbo ! Bigger than Jumbo ! Super- Extra Double-Jumbo ! or the all-time favorite, WouldYouLiketo UpgradeThattoSuperSize ?

But hey now ! a little work with a hex editor and I'm sure you could add a little marketing pizzazz to that boring old-fashioned PTC interface :-)

Ummm, I think the point was that pens and pen weights is ancient technology of pen plotters. This has absolutly no relevance to post script printing on ps enabled laser printers. The control language is outdated, leaving Pro/e in the AutoCAD

2D 'plotting' era. I know you got past ACAD plotting a couple years ago; surprised to see you apologizing for Pro/e's adherence to this decript, ancient, obsolete technology as some kind of "standard" when, in fact, it bases its printing technology on Postscript.

David Janes