One of the issues I see users struggling with, time and time again, is the amount of info they throw at a drawing design, to be viewed at a particular scale.
Because lineweights, numbered 0 to 31, are just relative to one another on-screen in terms of pixel thickness, there is no sense of scale when zooming in & out.
Yes there are clues like the grid, and perhaps using the object you are actually drawing to judge scale, but these don't give you the intuitive feedback you need to understand when you are adding too much detail. Nor does the on-screen line weight tell you how the drawing will actually look printed out. The first time you get a feel for how "dense" the line work is, is when you print to PDF or hardcopy.
With advances in some of the custom line tool option (eg. raster linestyles, and annotation scale awareness) its seems to me that "realistic" line weights should be something we can see on-screen in real time, to give the user the same immediate feedback as when viewing a PDF.
Also, having lineweights 0 to 31 only mapped to real world units in the the printer configuration file, helps no one understand whether they have drawn a 0.25mm line or a0.25mm line, because they only see line weights numbered 0,1,2,3,4,5, etc. It would be better if the selection dropdown actually stated the units.
The 32 choices for lineweight also bemuse & confuse users, when the top 8 or so are actually ever used for actual drafting. The thicker versions being largely unusable on screen anyway.
A shorter more meaningful list would be much better.
This probably means mapping the weights to units in a definition file (like sheet sizes, scales, units) rather than in the printer config, so that the line weight units are consistent for an entire workspace. The dropdown would only list the weights defined in the definition file as with scale/units/sheetsizes.
At the moment, custom line scaling is the closest thing we get to setting this kind of real world on-screen thickness (for custom linestyles), but it also affects the dot dash spacing of the style, so is not the actual global solution.
I think there is a real benefit to update how line weights work so that they appear WYSIWYG when chosen, placed, viewed on screen, etc.
Regards
Robert
Gerd Eisenacher 5 months ago
I second this. A WYSIWYG display would be nice.
Problem is here that the line "WEIGHT" this depends on the settings in the printer driver. For the most part people probably use the "default", but one cant be sure.
So before displaying the "printing" lineweight microStation needs to read the proposed printer driver.
There is also another linestyle property that is not used much (Linstyle width in working units) This could maybe "utilized" to translate printer driver settings into WISIWYG (?) This is only available with "custom" linstyles - otherwise the Linstyle parameters are not a part of the "Extended" element properties of a e.g. polygon
(sorry for the language setting - last time I changed it to EN I had to do a completely reinstall to get back to DE)
This is also a point that when you send out dgns and use a customized printer driver - the recipient needs to also get the printer driver - I prefer the PDF-printerdriver for that matter to check a drawing "outcome" concerning WYSIWYG before I send it to the printer.
Keith Ericksen 3 months ago
I agree. For all the things that Microstation does really well, WYSIWYG line weights have always been a sore spot -- and IMO, rather antiquated. Even AutoCAD had superior control of its weights. Additionally, there is no ability to scale line weights in Microstation if you are up-scaling or downscaling a drawing. The only solution therefore, is to print to PDF and scale the PDF accordingly. Finally, there is the issue of printer calibration. We use a variety of printers -- some newer, some quite old. I've had to compensate (and compromise) on the weights in my mapping table so that the output looks reasonably good on all output devices. It might be nice to have a master WYSIWYG driver for the screen and a second within each individual print driver for calibration. This would ensure that line weights displayed consistently across all printers -- new and old.
And, yes, once you get above a certain weight, the usefulness diminishes. For me, personally, I have extended the usefulness of the lower range by creating very subtle differences in pens 1-14, where it really matters. I keep a printed line weight guide at my desk to help me get accustomed to the new weights -- at least until line weight standards for my company can be established (I came on board about 6 months ago, when they were using only AutoCAD and there were no standards to speak of. I've got my work cut out for me!)
Bob Rayner 24 days ago
One alternative is to use custom linestyle Continuous and define the thickness.