Luckily we do not create 16.7 million pens in the CTB plot style dialog! The current True Color Wheel with 16.7 millions colors. Some visual flashback on the evolution of color in AutoCAD Some users mention the benefits of STB are less pen styles to manage or they can have project phased styles.ĪutoCAD Online Help on Plot Styles Use a Page Setup to Specify Plot Settings With AutoCAD 2000 came the style based plot styles or named plot styles (STB) option was added allowing you to assign plot styles including color, lineweights, screening to an object regardless of colors or layer set to the object. With a CTB plot style table you can specify the color, lineweight, linetype, screening, and so on that objects of a specific color will have when plotted. It comes from the days when we had pen plotters and there was 255 numbered pens available which correlated to the physical pens. CTB plot styles has been the default since the early days of AutoCAD supporting plotting/printing. The majority of AutoCAD users are using the default plot style of color based plot styles also known as color-dependent plot styles (CTB). Dont let the name fool you, CONVERTCTB will work to convert a CTB to STB to a STB to CTB. To Convert a CTB Plot Style file use CONVERTCTB. To Convert Drawing Plot Style File such as Shaan.ctb to Shaan.stb:
To convert a CTB mode drawing to STB mode or a STB mode drawing to CTB mode use the command CONVERTPSTYLES. If you need to convert an existing drawing from one to the other you can use the following commands at the AutoCAD commandline.
Autocad plot style stb vs ctb free#
If you want to share your reasons for using one plot style method over the other please feel free to post a comment to this blog post.ĪutoCAD comes with drawing templates for both CTB and STB drawings. About 95% use CTB most likely because that is not only the default but the way they have always done it.
It can be debated as to which is better but I will leave that for you to decide which works best for you and the people you exchange DWG files with. You have the choice to use the default color-dependent or named plot styles, but your drawing can only be one or the other. Working on a new CAD template CTB or STB I'm working on a CAD template that my company will expect consultants to use for all drawings submitted to us (plans, record drawings etc) I've only worked with CTB files, the current template (that most consultants don't use because it's not sufficient) is STB. AutoCAD provides the ability to assign how things plot/print such as lineweight, color, dithering etc.