All of a sudden now when I open up a DXF all of the lines are coming in as white lines. Is there a setting that changes this? Yes, I’ve looked at the settings under display and entity is set to a dark blue. Yet, DXF lines keep coming in as white.
Hi @acarlton,
which version of BC are you using?
Can you upload a sample dxf, where your problem happens?
Bye, Harald
I’m using V33. This same files came in last week as dark blue lines and this morning it’s coming in as white.
MP0090324 rev 3.DXF (25.4 KB)
Hey Ash, BobCAD will invert the entity color if the background color set in the Settings dialog for Document default and the entities in the dwg/dxf files are of the same color. This is so the entities are visible when importing those files into BobCAD. Very simple example, if you have background set to black and entities are also black color, then when the file is imported you will see the entities in white color. Perhaps you changed your background color in BobCAD settings between last week and this morning?
That’s what the problem was. I set my background to a slightly gray color. The lines come in while even though the entity color is set to dark blue. When I change back to a white background the lines come in dark blue. Another bug I’m finding in BobCAM.
Don’t all cad system do that. If you have black lines and a black background it just don’t work.
Your suspicions are correct, and it does have to do with the background color. In the past BobCAD never did modify the colors that were stored in the files and just loaded them as is, but a lot of customers complained because they used white backgrounds, but a lot of autocad users have black backgrounds and have white entities. So we essentially detect if any entity color is the same and we invert them. This is primarily for if the entity colors are white, and the background is white, then we make them black. Same for the other direction, if they are black and your background is black, we make them white.
If you could please share what the RGB value you were using for your background we can take a look and see if there is some flaws for particular background colors. Greys are indeed the hardest when they are close to white or close to black.
I personally use a nice middle grey color!
Just to be clear on this, BobCAD will never use the default entity color set in Settings when reading in a DXF. The DXF file itself has the color information for every entity inside of it, so we read the colors directly from the file.
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Thanks for the information. I looked into layer mapping in SolidWorks and was able to get the colors to export and show up in BobCAM. It might sound slight but this helps us in the long run.
No problem! We did double check the logic and it is very simple. If the color of the entity color matches your Default Document background color we reverse it. White becomes black, black becomes white, etc.
Otherwise we just read the color information stored in the DXF file and display it. So since light grey doesn’t equal white, you got the original color information from the DXF file how it was saved.
I mean we could go further and provide some options, like change white entities to black entities, but a lot of customers do utilize the color information in their programming. Definitely hard to make a one solution fits all with the way every system exports DXFs.
I mainly use Rhino but also struggled with this in BC-CAM. There also colors get reversed during import if the object color matches the background color.
No matter which CAD program one is using: I would love to have the option telling the CAD not to change color information. Often these colors have a concrete meaning (cut, contour, pocket, …) and to lose this information or to have to restore it is annoying.
@gmyers
yes please: go further to provide this option in BC-CAM 
Regards, Harald