If you haven’t read Parts One or Two, you might want to start here.

At SALA Architects, I use 6 pen sets on a standard project. In this post I’m going to discuss the basics of two:

one pen set, for structural drawings: HALF TONE (STRUCTURAL)
one pen set, for electrical drawings: HALF TONE (ELECTRICAL)

As I mentioned in Part One, setting a view to grayscale in the layout book isn’t good enough for me. I want every pen to go gray uniformly. And I want some pens to not go gray at all. What I want is a half-tone background and nice black information on top. In the images above you’ll notice that most, but not all the pens go to gray. Unused pens stay brown. I want those pens to jump out and scream “You’re not doing it right! Fix me!” Even someone who doesn’t use ArchiCAD will know something is wrong on a printed drawing when there’s five brown lines amidst a sea of grayscale. Pen 20 stays red. Pen 220 is always a 75% gray. Pens 91-100 never change either. They are always a gradation from white to black. I find it nice to have access to those pens for various fills. I’ll use pen 100 on layouts (since it’s always black and a decent line weight), but otherwise I never use those pens for anything but fills.

I now need to talk about notations for a moment. My notations (leaders, dimensions, text, section/elevation markers, etc.) use a unique set of pen numbers: pens 230 to 235 for architectural drawings and pens 210 to 215 for structural/electrical drawings. Isolating notations makes reading views on the screen easier; I will never confuse a dimension or a leader line for something that it’s not. Separate pens also improves options for find and select. I can select only objects with pen 230 and not accidentally select something I shouldn’t. If I turn off all layers except the dimension layer and I see something that’s not pens 230 to 235, then I know there’s a mistake. And if when I go to print, a boss thinks all dimension lines should be thinner or all arrows need to be fatter, then it’s a few quick clicks and no collateral damage. Again it’s all about isolation of data.

Notations for grayscale plans use a different set of pens, just one step up. So if text is usually pen 232, then for grayscale it’s 212. Visually it’s very easy to change the pens of a dimension to read in black in a grayscale plan. When changing a dimension to read black, just move the pens up one in the pen chart. I don’t need to know that it goes from pen 231 to 211. I just need to know in the chart where it starts. Each pair of pens (Pen 212 and 232, Pen 215 and 235, etc.) look the same in the STANDARD (BLACK) pen set. That way a dimension that needs to read black on both architectural drawings (black and white) and structural drawings (grayscale) looks the same as a regular dimension that would show black on architectural and gray on structural.

Why two grayscale pen sets? For now the difference is pen 190 and pen 240, but separate pen sets allows for further differentiation in the future. Pen 190 is the pen used for wall fills. In structural plans I don’t want to see poché in walls unless they’re bearing walls (pen 170). In electrical plans I want to see the poché. Pen 240 is white in all pen sets except structural. This allows me to fill posts and columns with this pen. On the structural plan these objects will show up as black and pop out. On every other drawing they’ll be white. Before I started using this pen I had to draw black fills over columns so that they’d show up correctly on the structural plan. Now it’s built into the pen set. And if I decide black rectangles don’t look right, I can easily change them to 75% gray or 60% gray or whatever I want without effecting anything else. And since how objects merge in section and plan depend on fill type and not pen number, those functions aren’t effected either. A column cut in section with empty fill and pen 240 will merge properly when it meets a slab with empty fill and pen 91–in the section view both 240 and 91 are white, and the fills match.

UPDATE March 24, 2014 – I finally wrote Pen Sets, Part 4. You can find it over on BIM Engine. Also keep an eye out for Parts 5 and 6 coming soon after Part 4.