Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

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Earl Grey
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 16, 2019 8:48 am

Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by Earl Grey » Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:06 am

Hello Everyone

I drew plans on a paper size of A1 in a 1:100 scale. Now my boss told me that they need to hand in the plans on A3 paper. So i changed the paper size to A3, changed the scale proportionally to 1:200 and thought that's all it would take. Unfortunately all of my lines turn out way too thick in the paper space now. To the point of making the plans unreadable. (see attached comparison picture).

The Example in the picture is data from a viewport in paperspace with a scaling of 0.5 (not sure if that's related). Seems that the line-weight problem corresponds with the scaling factor of the viewport too. Which is confusing to me.. shouldn't the final lineweight always be the one i set in the layer properties independent of scaling in the viewport?

Now i could of course go in manually and set all line-weights to ridiculously low amounts to counteract that effect. But i'd have to do that on roughly 25 Layers on 18 Files. Not something i wanna waste time on.

I tried using the option for global line-weight in the drawing-settings, but those don't seem to have any effect.

Any help would be much appreciated. It's probably an easy solution i just didn't see as i'm not a professional at this. But i can't seem to find it..

Greetings, Earl Grey
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andrew
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Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by andrew » Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:09 am

Please indicate your operating system and QCAD version.
Please attach drawing files (DXF, DWG).

Earl Grey
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 16, 2019 8:48 am

Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by Earl Grey » Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:34 am

OS is Windows 10 Pro 64bit

QCAD Professional
Version: 3.23.0.0 (3.23.0)
Revision: 42e52bf
Qt Version: 5.5.1
Architektur: x86_64
Compiler: MSVC++ 12.0 (2013)

I'm not allowed to attach the actual dwg files i'm working on as they are confidential according to company policy. So i'll create a "clean" version with relevant information deleted to upload here as soon as i can get to it.

Earl Grey
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 16, 2019 8:48 am

Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by Earl Grey » Mon Dec 16, 2019 10:24 am

Building XX EG 200 A3 20191216.dwg
(148.94 KiB) Downloaded 278 times
That would be the DWG File i'm working with

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andrew
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Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by andrew » Mon Dec 16, 2019 10:34 am

Thanks. This looks correct here. The lineweight of layer "UMRISS05" for example is 0.5mm. The lines show and print as 0.5mm which is correct. Note that line weights are always in paper measures, not drawing measures. Lineweights are also not scaled with the viewport.

Earl Grey
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Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 16, 2019 8:48 am

Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by Earl Grey » Mon Dec 16, 2019 11:07 am

Thanks for pointing that out. I assumed it was too thick because it looked so fat compared to how it used to look like. But i just printed it out on my end and it's the correct lineweight set in the layer attributes (0.5mm) as you said.

My main problem however (which i probably didn't specify cleary enough) was that i setup everything to be well readable on an A1 paper (including the line weights). Since i have to change everything to half the size (A3) now, i'd also have to adjust all the line weights to make the plans look clean again. I could go into every dwg-file and adjust the layers individually. But that would take a lot of time since it's quite a lot of files and layers. So what i'm looking for is a way to make that process more efficient. Like a way to globally scale lineweights across a document or through a viewport? Is there such an option in QCAD?

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andrew
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Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by andrew » Mon Dec 16, 2019 3:29 pm

No, there's no out of the box tool to scale layer lineweights. Note that lineweights cannot be any given number, but only a limited set of available lineweights. So this would have to be a mapping not a scaling.

If you're comfortable with script programming, you could relatively easily create a script to do a simple lineweight mapping. For example:

Code: Select all

include("scripts/EAction.js");

function MyScript(guiAction) {
    EAction.call(this, guiAction);
}

MyScript.prototype = new EAction();

MyScript.prototype.beginEvent = function() {
    EAction.prototype.beginEvent.call(this);

    var di = this.getDocumentInterface();
    var document = this.getDocument();

    var op = new RModifyObjectsOperation();

    var layerIds = document.queryAllLayers();
    for (var i=0; i<layerIds.length; i++) {
        var layerId = layerIds[i];
        var layer = document.queryLayer(layerId);

        if (layer.getLineweight()===RLineweight.Weight050) {
            layer.setLineweight(RLineweight.Weight025);
            op.addObject(layer);
        }
    }

    di.applyOperation(op);

    this.terminate();
};

/**
 * Adds a menu for this action.
 */
MyScript.init = function(basePath) {
    var action = new RGuiAction(qsTr("Change layer lineweights..."), RMainWindowQt.getMainWindow());
    action.setRequiresDocument(true);
    action.setScriptFile(basePath + "/MyScript.js");
    action.setGroupSortOrder(0);
    action.setSortOrder(0);
    action.setWidgetNames(["MiscLayerMenu", "MiscLayerToolBar", "MiscLayerToolsPanel"]);
};
If you safe this as file scripts/Misc/Examples/LayerExamples/MyScript/MyScript.js, this adds a menu "Misc > Layer > Change layer lineweights..." which changes the lineweight of all layers with lineweight 0.5 to 0.25.

Earl Grey
Newbie Member
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 16, 2019 8:48 am

Re: Lines become too thick when changing paper size and scale

Post by Earl Grey » Tue Dec 17, 2019 7:57 am

I'll try the scripting approach. Otherwise i'll just adjust it manually then. In any case: Thanks a lot for the help and feedback. I very much appreciate it :D

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