QCAD.org Forum

Currently, I work with autocad 2017 for windows at my job and with QCAD for MacOS at my private practice. So, I have to constantly open the same files in both programs.

As we know, pen widths in AutoCAD are based on external CTB files that assign a width per Index Color (i.e. "red", "yellow", "green", "blue", "cyan", "magenta", or 0, 1, 2, 3 ... 256).

However, whenever I save a drawing with QCAD (either DWG or DXF), the layer colors switch into "True Color" when opened on AutoCAD (i.e. RGB codes, such as "255,0,0" and so on). So, although I see them excactly as I did on QCAD. It SEEMS allright. But it is not. Whenever I have to preview, print or export the drawing at AutoCAD, all layers' colors are set as "True Color" and therefore with unconfigured pen widths.

Is there a way to keep the layer colors encoded as "Index Color" whenever I open the file again on AutoCAD after working with it on QCAD?

Which QCAD version you are using?

QCAD Professional, 3.27.00
Build Nov 30, 2021
Qt Version 5.14.2
Architecture: x86_64
Compiler Clang 10.0.0

But it did happen with previous versions.

Hi! Any answers?

QCAD does not work with color indices internally. When saving, QCAD stores both the color index and the true color value in the file. It looks like Autocad ignores the color index in this case.

The situation could be improved by only storing the color index if there is a matching color index and only storing the true color if there is no matching color index.

There is a small catch though: Autocad has duplicate values in its color index (e.g. both indices 7 and 10 are both red). For QCAD there is no way of knowing if the original file had a color set to index 7 or 10. QCAD would simply choose 7 in this case, possibly altering the original color index.

If you can live with that limitation, this could be implemented.

Thank you for the answer.
When you say "this could be implemented", you mean that in future versions of QCAD it may be implemented or that I should setup something that I missed?

This means that it's technically possible to implement for a future version of QCAD. I will look into it and see if there are any downsides of this approach.