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Line thickness in drawings

Tekla Structures
2021
Tekla Structures

Line thickness in drawings

You can set the printer line thickness (pen number) in the Print drawings dialog box, but you may have some challenges in showing the lines correctly in the drawing on the screen. You can solve this issue by adjusting the printer line widths or by using some predefined printer settings in the printer definition file plotdev.bin.

Change line thickness (pen width/pen number/line width) for printed drawings

You can change the line width for printing. To do this, open the Print Drawings dialog box and go to the Line properties tab:

The base line default width is 0.01, and this can be changed using the advanced option XS_BASE_LINE_WIDTH. For example, to get the line thickness of 0.25 mm, enter the number 25.

Set the line thickness shown on the screen

The line thickness that you see in the drawing is not the real line thickness that you get in the printed drawing. There is a way to affect how the lines are shown in the drawing.

To be able to set the pen width for the drawings in a Tekla Structures model:

  1. Take old printing into use by setting the advanced option XS_USE_OLD_PLOT_DIALOG to TRUE.
  2. Define the line settings for the first printer in the list.

  3. Take new printing into use by setting the advanced option XS_USE_OLD_PLOT_DIALOG to FALSE.
  4. Go to the File menu and check if the switch Printer line widths is active or not. This switch takes the settings from the old printer dialog settings. If the switch is not active, the line widths are only shown in black and white mode, if active, the line widths are shown for all color modes.

    You can toggle between color modes by pressing B.

The file plotdev.bin in ..\ProgramData\Trimble\Tekla Structures\<version>\environments\default\system contains some predefined line thicknesses for the first printer instance. These are not the same that you use for printing, unless you use defaults in the Print Drawings dialog box.

You can save printer definitions file plotdev.bin in the current model folder or in the project and firm folders, and in a folder indicated by the advanced option XS_DRIVE. Tekla Structures searches first for plotdev.bin in the model, project and firm folders, then in the folder indicated by the advanced option.

Without line thickness (pen number) set up in plotdev.bin With settings for line weight for the first printer in plotdev.bin
Color
Grayscale
Black and white
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