In color display or output, lines may be drawn with different colors, and faces or forms may be filled or shaded with different colors (except in pen plots). In black-and-white display or output, various dot-patterns, simulating shades of gray, are normally used for fills, and for lines if they are wide enough.
This section discusses the common aspects of color/shade input for lines and fills, as occurs in many input dialogs in SHAPE. Depending on the type of display and output involved, any of three different sets of colors or patterns/shades may be used.
(a) For color screen displays, printer, raster or Metafile output, actual colors are used. The RGB components, which are numbers ranging from zero to 255 can be directly entered in the edit boxes, but the color is most easily and reliably selected with the Select...Color buttons. These bring up the Choose
Color dialog, presenting the colors of the current 16-color palette. If the color is being selected for shading (Shading dialog in the Input1 menu), the color chosen here is that at maximum (perpendicular) illumination.
For 16-, 24-, and 32-bit color screen displays you have complete freedom to choose colors. For 8- or 4-bitcolor the colors for fills and shading may be forced at plot time to one of a limited number of allowed colors. For 8-bit color the number of colors allowed depends on the number of shading zones selected in the Shading dialog in the Input2 menu. See the general section Colors and Palettes for further information on palettes for the 8-bit color mode.
For best results on a wide range of display and output devices, chose the simplest colors, which are firstly colors 0-7 in the default 16-color palette, and secondly colors 8-15
(b) For black-and-white screen displays and dot-matrix output, either true grays or dot patterns of various densities are used. The codes for these shades or patterns range from 0 for white to 15 for solid black. See Dot Patterns for details on the nature of these patterns.
The selected pattern is used for lines only if the width of the line is greater than one dot. The width of various types of lines is set in the Line Attributes dialog in the Input2 menu. Note that rendering of gray-scale for lines in black-and-white printed output is determined by the printer driver, not SHAPE. Many printer drivers do not support gray lines, and pattern numbers other than 15 may give either white or black lines.
(c) For pen-plotters the number requested refers to the pen number used in drawing the lines. There are no fills or shading in pen plots. These numbers are not used if the single-pen mode is selected in the Pen Plotter Settings dialog in the Settings menu.
When changing the red, green and blue values directly in the edit boxes which appear in many dialogs in SHAPE, the rectangle showing the actual color does not change until the focus shifts from the current edit field, that is until the mouse is clicked in another place in the dialog.