Hi Guys,

I am totaly new to autocad, just got my hands on Autocad 2009 and need to do a few basic things for my purpose (I am builder)

I have 2 DWG files. 1 is the existing floor plan of a building and the other is a new plan of the building (i.e changes and additions etc to the floor plan)

I want to change the color the first drawing to say RED (i.e all text all lines all boxes, everything is changed to red)
Then i want to change the color of the second drawing to say BLUE (again evertying on this drawing to be blue)

Then i want to overlay drawings 1 & 2 on same page so I can see exactly what the differences are from the 2 drawings and be able to print this drawing.

Remembering im a complete newb to Autocad can someone outline step on how i can achieve this in Autocad 2009?


Thanks in advance.

yes u can use xref as suggested above (dont forget that both plans have to be at the same location and in correct scale). But as you havent worked with autocad before, I would suggest smth "more simple":
create new drawing, copy both drawing into this new one. select the first model and change the color to red, 2nd to blue. You could create new layers (blue, red) so that you have each layout in different layers. Or after you changed the color of both plans you could create block of each the plans. Either way, now you can move one plan over the other one and you can c the differencies.

Yes, that is the normal behavior of blocks, if you have block and change it's color, you don't change color of separate entities inside the block, ale only the color of it's wrapping, and it has effect only for enetities with color set as ByBlock.
I really think, that the better way is throuhg the xrefs... try this steps:
- command XREF - there button Attach DWG
- select the drawing you want to overlay and click open
- set overlay and everything else to 0 and OK
- if nothing is seen, zoom all
- go to Layer manager (command LAYER), there is a tree at the left side of the dialogue, unroll xref and there you see your overlayed drawing, select it
- to all layers (right part of dialogue) of your xref (select it through right mouse button - select all, or ctrl+a if the layer part of dialogue is active) change the color
- OK and exit the dialogue

repeat it for second drawing too.


Edited by Kackac - 28.Nov.2008 at 09:24