Plot on a black & white printer

By Ellen Finkelstein

Do you ever print out draft plots on a black & white laser printer? If so, you may have found that the plots were in grayscale and some of your objects were such a light gray that they were hard to see. Instead, you’d probably like all objects to appear in full black.

Here’s a simple technique to accomplish this task:

Start the PLOT command.

Click the More Options button at the lower-right corner of the dialog box to open the right side, shown here.

Click the drop-down list in the Plot Style Table section at the top and choose monochrome.ctb (or monochrome.stb). This is a plot style that prints everything in black, just what you want.

Make sure that the Plot with Plot Styles check box (a little further down) is checked.

Now, plot again and all your objects will be dark black.

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Ellen Finkelstein

Ellen Finkelstein is the author of the best-selling AutoCAD & AutoCAD LT Bible, which started with R14. Ellen has written extensively on AutoCAD, including articles for Autodesk’s website and features for AutoCAD’s Help system. Ellen’s first book was AutoCAD For Dummies Quick Reference.

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dul bayan

March 13, 2012 at 4:15 am

This helped a lot! Thanks for the tip.

david

January 18, 2013 at 10:55 am

I have followed the steps above, but have been unsuccessful at getting all my lines plotted in black.

I am trying to create a PDF, and not plot to a printer, so does this affect things?

When I do follow the steps, and plot to PDF, everything appears in color. When I selected BLACK/WHITE in the Adobe printer settings, I get a grayscale plot, and not solid black lines.

Any other tips? Please help!! Thanks.

Bill DeShawn

January 18, 2013 at 1:05 pm

For screened output, you need full AutoCAD. AutoCAD LT in my experience, is not capable of screened plotting. So if you have a patio slab that you want to use a salid hatch on, and have it be gray, you have to plot it with a CTB file from full AutoCAD and plot it with full AutoCAD and not LT. LT will ignore all percentages less than 100% when it plots. LT is not ACAD.

Bill DeShawn
http;//my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn

Eugene

April 15, 2014 at 2:41 am

Guys, I was trying to find out how and when it may be useful to choose 100%, 75%, 50% etc. screening in the PAGE SETUP or PLOT command to plot in MONOCHROME. Could you kidly give me leads, please?