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posted 04/24/07 by Anthony Governanti Heading down the highway...

Well, my third week as Sales Guy is starting with a trip down to NYC to drop in on the Experience the Possibilities Tour. I hope to meet some of our customers there, and also take in a bit of the city, since this will be my first time in NYC.

Of course my first challenge is to get there in one piece! I'll be heading south sometime tomorrow, and hope my navigation skills will steer me away from as much traffic as possible. Anyway, if you are planning on attending the event, make sure to say hello - I'll be the tall Italian in a black suit and tie....wait, this is NY, that would describe most of the people there. Well, I'll have to get up front and introduce myself then so you can come say hello.

It has been a while since I shared any tips here, so I suppose it's time to give one to tide you over until Nick can hit ya with the good stuff. With Civil 3D's new Plan Production feature, there is the ability to define a hatch patter or mask for the outside of the Match Lines. This is a really cool feature, in that you can fade back or hide the line work that exists to the outside of the sheets that are generated. One cool thing you can do with this hatch is set it to a solid color, and it will "mask" out the line work. The problem is that if you set the color to White, when you flip over to a standard Layout, it has a white background. What happens to color White when the AutoCAD background is White? It turns it to Black. Pretty cool for line work, not so cool for a big solid mask.

So when you configure the matchline styles, you can use color 255,255,255 instead of the Acad standard White, and avoid the problem. I'd give a screen shots, but I don't have Civil 3D installed anymore!

View image
Here is what the final output looks like if you use the 255 trick.

See the lobotomy has already begun, but its slower than predicted.

Till next time,
Cheers,
AG

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