Managing Overlapping Hatched Entities

[Fivecorners]

QCAD Pro 3.30.1.0 - Windows 7
Hi Everyone,
Here I am again, this time with a really puzzling issue. Using black-and-white drawing, I am trying to show overlapping entities that have hatches instead of solid fills.
In regular drawing mode, it looks like everything is good to go. But in Print Preview, my drawing is not displaying correctly--no matter how much I have edited layers, Application Preferences or Drawing Preferences. Seems like I need to make the hatch be opaque somehow. Please see image below to understand what I am trying to do (image not created with QCAD). Horizontal rectangle is behind vertical rectangle. Any suggestions?

hatchoverlap.jpg (27.99 KiB) Viewed 4739 times

[CVH]

Hi,
Seems easy enough ...

Crossing-Hatches.png (6.64 KiB) Viewed 4719 times

It is a combination of:
- A back hatched area solid in paper color with drawing order 1
- A horizontal hatched area with pattern ANSI31 at 0° in Black with drawing order 2
- The horizontal contour in Black with drawing order 3
- A vertical hatched area solid in paper color with drawing order 4
- A vertical hatched area with pattern ANSI31 at 90° in Black with drawing order 5
- The vertical contour in Black with drawing order 6

Then it is important to not prevent white on white and black on black for printing.
See Application Preferences .. Graphics View .. Appearance .. Color Adjustment.
Remind that this has a global effect on all entities.

The key feature is the drawing order.
Layers don't influence the drawing order.
Don't think of them as a kind of drawing surfaces stacked on top of each other.
Layers are mainly used to control the attributes of entities that live on them.
Tutorial: Working with Layers

Perhaps the new feature Wipeouts (solid fill in background color) can be of any use.
See QCAD Changelog for the upcomming release (>3.30.1)


Regards,
CVH

[Fivecorners]

Thank you for your response, CVH...
After following your steps, I have made progress. But a white-filled entity is still covering a hatch. Can't figure out how to Reorder the entities. I will have to research this.

[CVH]

The drawing order is an adaptable property, see Property Editor when the entity is selected.

Order 1-6 is the relative order of these 4 hatches and 2 contours as example.
With these drawing orders they are drawn in the back of entities with drawing order 7 or higher.
And in front of entities with a drawing order zero or lower.

The drawing order can thus be negative and duplicate drawing orders may exist in a current open drawing session.
For duplicate drawing orders the Handle is used additionally to determine what is in front and what is behind the other entities.
Remind that the drawing order is re-ordered upwards from zero avoiding duplicate orders by Handle on Save - Reload.
And then gaps in the drawing orders can persist.

For any newly added entity the drawing order is 1 higher that what already exists on creation.
Changing an entity's drawing order will not re-order the rest automatically.

Bring to Front (MF) New drawing order of selected = Max drawing order + 1.
Send to Back (MB) New drawing order of selected = Min drawing order - 1.
Reorder (MO) Is not of particular usage in this matter as it starts re-ordering all visual entities from zero.
View .. Overlay .. Order (VO) May be of some limited use. The overlay markers may be stacked obscuring the others.

For our 6 stacked entities ... At this instance ...
Behind everything else: Carefully select them one by one in reverse order and Send to Back (MB) for each.
In front of everything else: Carefully select them one by one in the required order and Bring to Front (MF) for each.
Remind that newer entities will be drawn in front of them.

Regards,
CVH