AutoCAD Civil 3D 2016 – On Screen Colours (Why are my tables green!?)

By Geoff Woodhead 

I’m often asked why tables that we insert into our models have green linework (see fig. 1 below) instead of black (or white on a black background).

Fig. 1

This is due to the need to visualise lines on the screen in different colours to each other so that we can differentiate them from one another whilst draughting, these lines may then need to be printed in black at varying thicknesses. Rather than remapping each of the colours and then the next time the file needs editing having to map them back, then when were done editing we have to map them all to black... I’m sure you can see how this would be a tedious process. Enter the CTB file, it allows you to have one colour displayed on the screen but with the tick of a box on your plot menu and all of the colours are overridden with those of your choosing during plotting. You can see the colours that would be plotted on the screen through the plot preview menu.

It is also possible to display the plotted colours in the model space or on a layout tab, the process is the same in each case. To enable the display of plot styles on screen we must:

1. Right click on the desired layout tab (or model) and select Page Setup Manager.
2. Select the relevant page setup and select Modify, you will be presented with a dialog box similar to the one in fig. 2 below.
3. Select AutoCAD Civil 3D 2015 UKIE from the Plot style table (pen assignments) area, highlighted by the red box in fig. 2.
4. Ensure that the Display plot styles tick box is ticked and select OK and then close on the Page Setup manager dialog.

Fig. 2

If you successfully followed the steps above then you should now have tables that look like the one in fig. 3, if you haven’t then the chances are that you just need to regenerate your model, this can be done by typing REGEN (or RE for short) into the command line and pressing enter.

Fig. 3