How to change colours of imported dxf

[jc-s]

I've been sent some dxf drawings that I need to use as the basis of a new design. However, when these are imported into Alibre many of the lines and features are in a very hard to read colour (yellow on the white background is particularly hard!).

How can the imported drawing be edited to change these colours?

The layers dialog looked promising until I realised there were no yellow layers. So I've no idea how to select all the bad colours, nor how to change them. Ideally, change them to something dark but slightly different (black, dark blue, etc). But making everything black would be a good step forward.

 

[Lew_Merrick]

I've been sent some dxf drawings that I need to use as the basis of a new design. However, when these are imported into Alibre many of the lines and features are in a very hard to read colour (yellow on the white background is particularly hard!).

How can the imported drawing be edited to change these colours?

The layers dialog looked promising until I realised there were no yellow layers. So I've no idea how to select all the bad colours, nor how to change them. Ideally, change them to something dark but slightly different (black, dark blue, etc). But making everything black would be a good step forward.

Assuming that you have set-up your Layer Line Types settings, you can change the Line Layer settings one "line" at a time (or you can create a special Drawing Format with Layer Line Types appropriate to what you are Importing).

 

[NateLiquidGravity]

DXF are human readable text documents. Using a programming editor like Atom (it's free) you can search and replace for multi-line text. Group code 62 is the color number. Yellow will be an integer value of either 2 ( as shown) or around 50.
Blue is the integer 5.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/sear...3610039E-27D1-4E23-B6D3-7E60B22BB5BD-htm.html

 

[jc-s]

Thank you, this is a huge help. I didn't realise dxf files were just ascii.

I've swapped yellow and a few other colours using a global search and replace:

swap yellow to black
replace : "\n 62\n 2"
with : "\n 62\n 7"

swap green to dark grey
replace : "\n 62\n 3"
with : "\n 62\n 251"

I found more info on the colour pallette in this post, which was helpful:
https://www.globalmapperforum.com/discussion/4028/dxf-color

 

[DavidJ]

The individual lines had colours overridden from the layer colour - to edit inside AD, you have to re-set each line to overcome the override. So doing it in text editor is probably less trouble once you work it out.

 

[jc-s]

Right. That explains why the layer colours didn't match the line colours!

 

[NateLiquidGravity]

A value of 256 indicates BYLAYER but that may or may not help.

 

[jc-s]

Changing to 256 does indeed help. I can now change the layer colours using the layers dialog and the drawing updates.
Nice!