My client has been using a "printer" driver called WinLINE to process line colors into a .PLT file with lines of differring thickness, according to the colors used in the drawing in Autosketch. Here is the WinLINE website http://www.winline.com/ It uses a carosel of color associations to associate colors with line thickness. For example, source color Red is transformed into a Black line of thickness 0.13mm; and source color Green is transformed into a Black line of thickness 0.5mm. They have been using an older version of the driver that only runs using Windows 98. It seems to work nicely, but it would save a lot of time and effort if we could update to the latest version (v8) that runs under Windows XP. The problem I am having is that these two versions seem to be behaving differently. The older version of the software's color association carousel looks like this:http://img.waffleimages.com/8c1564153780bb77b59474ca7a047acd6e64eef2/OldDriverScreen.jpgIt produces a nice drawing in which all lines are black and of differing thicknesses, appropriately, and the color Green is translated to a line that is of a lighter shade. However, I don't see in this carousel setup screen where the lighter shade is specified so I don't know how it knows to make the target line look like this. The newer version of the software's color association carousel looks nicer, and includes a "Target Color Density" option, which I would think I could set to 50% under the Green association to get the same effect as the above older driver. However, all lines still come out looking 100% Black. I can also select "50% Black" as the target color, instead of just Black. Still, all lines come out looking the same 100% shade of Black. If there is another way to do this, I am open to other ideas and would be grateful to hear them. I need to be able to translate drawings of different pen colors from Autosketch into Plot files, PDF files, vector files, that can transform the pen colors into vector lines of differing thickness.

I am going to rephrase my problem here as I have figured out a little bit more about it. They are using an old version of Winline, which only works in Windows 98, to export drawings from Autosketch to .plt files while translating different pen colors in Autosketch to corresponding line weights and styles as specified in the Winline configuration. It acts as a plotting printer, but outputs to a .plt file, while translating pen colors to respecting line weights. Refer to this picture to see what the drawing looks like this when using the older version of Winline. http://img.waffleimages.com/da29b2de3a9f0f09947a096ce14be18f627bc3f0/WinlineScreens.JPG This is how I want it to look. Notice the lighter shaded lines. They are originally the pen color Dark Green, and what is funny is that Dark Green is not even included on the color carousel within the older Winline. Maybe that lighter shaded line is just a greyscale version of the dark green color, skipped by Winline because it is not on the carousel? Well, the newer Winline renders it like 100% Black if I leave it out there as well. When the newer version of Winline is set up using the same color associations, all the lines are 100% Black. If I add a 9th color association for Dark Green, and change the Target Color to 30% Black, or change the Target Color Density to 30%, the line still comes out looking like 100% Black. If I change the Target Color to 10% Cyan, the resulting line still looks like 100% Black. I can verify that Dark Green is the correct color association, because it changes weight like it should when I set Minimum Line Width.
TYAIPD2008-06-10 22:10:33