Colors on the "blue" prints 3

[CheckerHater]

I have an unusual question (as most of the people on the forum).

As someone who grew up in the times of pencils, paper and poor quality blueprints I am a firm believer into strictly black-and-white linework.

Nevertheless in today’s world you can hardly find B&W printer or copier if you want to buy one.

So my question is: Does anyone see the advantage in using color in engineering (besides obvious applications for Maps and Architecture), and did anyone ever encounter standard regulating use of color. (Once again, not just color to indicate AutoCAD layers, but “final product” print actually made in color.)

I will welcome both: references to actual standards and opinions based on experience.

 

[KENAT]

OK, another problem with 'significant' coloring.

Some people are color blind. One of our top electrical guys is colorblind and sometimes has trouble with schematics etc. that are color coded.

Until we can be sure that people will only ever get color 'copies' of the drawing and can see those colors then I think sticking to black and white for final prints makes a lot of sense.

Sure having annotation a different color from geometry in the native CAD is handy, but it should be secondary to the other formatting that works for monochrome.

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[MechNorth]

I was thinking about color blind people too Kenat. My thoughts though, as somebody who deals with invisible disabilities and limitations (mine and others) daily, are that it is largely up to the person with the disability to self-identify and find reasonable accommodation. A colleague with colour blindness couldn't see details in some of my presentation materials; they identified the issue, and I shifted colours to accommodate.

By no means am I saying that everyone should be required to use colour prints, but they are a useful tool in many situations, and are growing in popularity and value. To automatically write-off a technology because of a potential issue with a small percentage of the constituency seems inappropriate.

Jim Sykes, P.Eng, GDTP-S
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[KENAT]

Well, as well as drawings we use our CAD to generate 'work instructions' - typically detailed step by step assy procedures.

When we first started doing this we got shop floors input, they could have illustrations as either colored 'model views' or monochrome 'line drawings' and we prepared examples of each. They opted for the monochrome version.

Now we do use color in these documents in text for different call outs (preemptive quality measures, assembly steps, post assy inspections/checks) but they are accompanied by different symbols so that if printed out black and white it's clear what is what.

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[MechNorth]

Robustness of process. Makes sense, and a good solution.

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[ajack1]

I do find colour blindness an odd reason not to use colour. The most common (I believe) form is to struggle to tell the difference between red and green, so to someone they might look the same, if you print in black and white they are the same.

I am not sure how many people who suffer from this crash at every set of traffic lights they use, not many I would guess, but to the rest of us the colours make it easier for the mind to quickly take in the data, the same goes for green start buttons and red stop buttons, or wiring looms or any number of other example. We simple take in data better in colour, so why not use it?

If you don’t print in colour because someone might be colour blind then why not print all word documents in Braille as the person may be totally blind?

 

[KENAT]

ajack, the color blind thing is a very secondary concern it just occured to me because my colleague does sometimes have trouble. However, it goes along with ensuring that if you do use color in the electronic version that if printed out on black and white printer it is still legible.

As I mentioned before, drawings from our CAD printed 'gray scale' can be barely legible since some of the default CAD colors convert to a fairly pale gray. However, if you use the 'print all colors as black' option they come out as true black in the appropriate line weight.

However, when people save a drawing from our CAD down as color pdf and then someone prints it they don't seem to have the option of 'print all colors as black' on most viewers and it gray scales and becomes difficult to read.

As to the traffic lights and stop buttons etc. most of them have some other function indicator than just the color. For traffic lights it's the position, for emergency stop buttons it's usually a label... (Yeah you could get silly and worry about color blind folk that are illiterate but I figure that goes beyond a 'good faith effort'.)

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[drawoh]

KENAT,

The other issue here is that if colour is not reliable, we need some other way to communicate the information. In drafting, we use line thickness and style.

One of my pet peeves where I work, is that people are loading CAD viewers and printing drawings. They have not configured the CAD viewers to control line thickness. It is hard to tell dimension lines apart from features.

JHG

 

[MechNorth]

I don't recall line thickness being a controlling issue in Mechanical Engineering drawings. Architecture, yes, but not mechanical engineering. Did I miss something in a standard somewhere (it does happen ;~} )?

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[KENAT]

Y14.2 or one of those isn't it MechNorth?

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[btrueblood]

With stop lights, the colors are carefully set - the green lights have a significant amount of blue, and the red light a significant amount of yellow, so that colorblind people can mostly still see them as different shades. Similar selection of the colors used might help if your company decides to implement some type of color coding.

8% of the population (mostly males) suffer colorblindness (wikipedia). Personally, I don't think of that as a small percentage, at least not if somebody was doing bomb disposal (cut the grey-ish wire!). Seriously, adding the ability to still read/decode the drawing if printed in b&w, by use of secondary code or lineweight or whatever should be considered, or even a note that the original is printed in color with the colors labelled (yellow = THIS, etc.) should be considered to preserve the intent.

I still hate the default yellow color for dimension text in AutoCad. The yellow just disappears when you view the drawing in paperspace or light-colored background, and if printed in color by mistake it just goes away entirely.

 

[fsincox]

In the "old days" tool drswings used color in combination with line types to show the tool and the customer's part fixtured in a fixture drawing. The color showing lighter and the phantom line type made it very readable in B & W. Checker's used a lot of colors, particularly red on my drawings, as I recall.
Frank

 

[MikeHalloran]

I worked in one place that used color semi-pictorial diagrams to describe how to wire electrical control boxes, so that the wiring could be done by people who couldn't necessarily read a schematic.

I learned a lot about AutoCAD's multiline functions, the existence of which I had never before suspected. With them, you can construct a polyline that actually comprises some number of parallel individual lines, using contrasting colors to depict stripes and adjacent dashed lines to depict tracers.




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[pierdesign]

At one of my early jobs the company had a standard for different colour paper to be used for drawings depending on their status. White paper, pink paper, blue paper. I don't remember any more what the paper colour signified, but at the time I thought it was the weirdest thing ever in an engineering office and I still do. 20+ years later I still have some copies of pink paper blue prints that always make me smile. It was the proverbial 'hot' or bubblegum pink too!

I notice most of the conversation is still concerning resolution issues of colour / grey scale reproduction on paper. Probably a few industries will never move beyond that, but most are. Colour will be ubiquitous as original design data in any form is accessed by more than the designer; the resolution of black & white - grey scale - colour on paper will become irrelevant.

On to the colour blindness issue.... It's truly misunderstood. The fact is people with this issue have a lifetime of coping skills, much more developed and multi-variate than simplistic position of a light, a printed icon.

 

[Walterke]

Coping skills or not, I wouldn't let a colorblind person diffuse a bomb where he has to cut the green (read: grey) wire and not the red (read: grey) one.

Color can be used as long as you don't NEED it. As certain examples have showed before. Dimensions could be put in another color to differentiate them from the rest of the drawing, but the color should be picked in a way that it is still readable when printed in greyscalse/B&W or when read by colorblind people.

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[KENAT]

If you're letting anyone defuse a bomb (at least IED or terrorist ones etc.) that relies solely on the bomb maker having conveniently color coded the wires then your judgement is in serious error.

(Or according to some RAF bomb squad sources you may just be in America.)

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[Walterke]

I was using the existing example to make a point. As you may have noticed, the only thing I know from diffusing bombs comes from Arnie movies.

The point I was trying to make is that, even though color blind people have several coping skills, if your rely solely on a difference in color to give your information, there's no way to cope for that.

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