Expert: Bill DeShawn - 6/23/2004

Question
We have a civil engineering drawing that won't display the solid hatch in either the bar scale or north arrow in the plot preview and subsequent plot. You can see the solid hatch (or fill) in model space and layout page but not in the plot preview. Fillmode is set to 1. Dashed polylines with a width assigned also show up as a series of rectangles in the preview.

If we plot from model space, the fill is there and polylines plot correctly, but not if we plot  from the layout (paper space). We are using ACAD 2005 and an Oce TDS 400 plotter. Machine is a 2 month old Dell running XP Pro.  Plenty of memory and HDD space. This is only happening in this particular drawing.

Answer
Solids won't display or plot if the drawing is 3D and is configured by the user to shade as hidden.  They also won't display if the plane on which the objects are placed is not parallel with the current view.  I'm still using 2004, so I may not be able to manipulate all the settings you are able to see and change.  There is a system variable or command called HIDEPLOT.  There is no help with that command from AutoCAD in 2004.  But it is an MVIEW option as well.  Here is what AutoCAD 2002 says about it:

Issue

You want to improve performance when using the HIDE command to remove lines from a drawing before plotting it using the HIDEPLOT option.

Solution

Turn on the HIDEPLOT option only for the views that need to be hidden before plotting the drawing so that the application performs the process instead of the hard copy device driver, which can take longer to do.

Set up the Layout views, title block, blocks, and other things as you normally would before plotting.
Note: Make sure that in the drawing is in the Layout and that the viewport borders are displayed before proceeding to step 2.

Type mview on the command line.
Type H to select the Hideplot option.
Type ON to enable the Hideplot option.
Select the border of the viewport(s) that the HIDE command will affect.
Press ENTER to complete the command.
Turn off or freeze the viewport border(s) layer as you normally would before plotting.
The HIDE command will run on each viewport that has the Hideplot option enabled. You can now print or plot the drawing.

Note: Make sure you clear the Hide option on the Plot Settings tab in the Plot dialog box. If this box is selected, everything will be hidden, and the MVIEW settings will be ignored.

So, Tom, Run MVIEW and check that your HIDEPLOT OPTION is turned off if that is what is desired, make sure your solids are in a plane parallel with the current view, and in the plot dialog box, and if your solids are placed in paper space, make sure that your checkbox marked "Hide Paperspace Objects" is not checked, Make sure that if the Shaded Viewport Options / Shade plot option is not grayed out that it shows "As Displayed".  Also, run SHADEMODE and if you don't need to Hide lines in your plot, set SHADEMODE to wireframe.
Well, that's all I can think of right now.  Let me know how it goes.  If you wish, you can respond when you provide feedback.

Keep in touch
Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn