I fail to see how this sample is even remotely relevant
to the argument that .ctb files cause grief. That file
prints just like the .ctb file tells it to.
Jason, my argument was that MY ctb files are hardware-dependent and
therefore of no use to anyone else in achieving the intended
color-to-lineweight correspondence. Fortunately, we practically never share
files with anyone else, so it's not normally a problem. But in the rare
cases where someone else needs to plot one of our files, our ctb won't help
them. Obviously ctb's aren't necessarily a source of grief, but they can be,
if they cause confusion and/or false expectations of trouble-free plotting.
If the .ctb file actually had the weights/screening defined
(like most .ctb files do) how could there be a problem
with printing this file?
That's my point: our ctb files don't contain this information, and since
they don't, you aren't going to get the intended lineweights and screenings
by plotting from our ctb's. Granted, we do things in an odd way, but since
it doesn't cause us a problem, so far, there hasn't been sufficient reason
to fix it.
In the wacky system that I inherited, our plotters are configured to act
like old fashioned pen plotters. The ctb, and therefore the plot files,
contain only "virtual" pen numbers, not lineweights, and therefore the
plotted appearance depends on how those "pens" are programmed on the
plotters. On our plotters, the sample drawing plots each line just as it's
labeled. But since there are no other plotters on earth programmed in the
same way, nobody else can get a correct plot from those ctb's. By the same
token, we can't plot from anyone else's ctb's either, because regardless of
the lineweights given in the ctb, our plotters will override them according
to the hard-wired pen settings.
Maybe it's a very unusual and slightly outlandish situation, but my argument
was that ctb's CAN be implicitly hardware-dependent, though clearly they
shouldn't be. For most people, it's probably pretty reasonable to assume
that both the producer of the ctb and the recipient have a relatively
up-to-date plotter, and that they've chosen (by design or accident) to set
up their plotter in a way that reflects smart practice. But I'm playing
devil's advocate by pointing out that those are only fairly safe
assumptions, not known facts. (Looking back at all the various discussions
here, in how many instances would it be valid to assume that everybody
always does things in the smartest way in Acad?) It's within the realm of
possibility to create a valid ctb that's useless to anyone else.
But you raise a good point -- I think our ctb's could be made to "play nice"
by adding weight/screening information, even though that info would be
superfluous and ignored by our plotters, but AFAIK it wouldn't hurt to have
it in there anyway. I'll need to look into that.
