Issue:
You may, for various reasons, find the need to change the background of your Vault visualization files for Inventor 2D documentation (i.e., DWG/IDW). In some cases, this may be a personal or corporate preference, or it may just help your users with readability when viewing the DWF files of your designs.
Causes:
Vault uses global visualization settings that apply to all visualizations (DWF/DWFX) which are created by Vault processes (see below).
It should be noted that these settings do not apply to PDF files or DWF/DWFX files that are created locally by Vault users on check in.
Solution:
If you would like to change the background color of the visualization files to your preferred color, then you will need an administrative role in the Vault. If you do not have proper permissions, attempts to change any of the visualization settings (and other settings as well) will return the following message:
With proper permissions, you will access the settings from the following menu:
Once you open the “Publish Options” as shown above, you will need to make the preferred settings for each version of Inventor that you intend to use with the Vault. For example, since each version of Vault will work with the same release of Inventor, along with two previous versions, you may need to make the setting change up to three times. However, if you only use one version of Inventor with Vault, then you would only need to make the setting change once.
Select the version(s) of Inventor you are using and then in each settings dialog, you will first select the option to “Override Sheet Color”. Once that option is selected, then you will then be able to choose your preferred Sheet Color.
Once you select “Sheet Color”, you will see the following interface:
You can choose from three different tabs for your color source (Custom, Web, and System).
If you want a custom color, you can choose one of the predefined colors or you can Right-click on a blank cell as shown above to bring up the Custom Color interface shown below:
Once you’ve chosen your preferred background color, going forward that will be the color used by the visualization files generated by Vault. Keep in mind, that this setting will not affect any existing visualization files unless they are updated.
Now that you have your sheet color set, the last step is to select the files whose visualization files you would like to update. While you can manually choose files to update, it is often more efficient to select groups of files to update.
You can select groups of files two main ways. The first is to “Shift-select” or “Ctrl-select” the files as they are displayed in the Main Pane of Vault Explorer. This selection method is limited to files contained in the displayed folder and can be tedious if you have a mixture of drawing and model files displayed without filters. Select the desired files and then choose the Update View command from the Action drop down as shown below:
The second method offers more flexibility by using the Advanced Find tool which allows you to refine your selection set using any of the properties available in Vault. Set your search criteria and run your search to get the group of files you want. Once you have the list of files, select them, and then perform the Update View command as shown below:
Hopefully, this will help you make those visualizations more legible for your users without all the manual labor.
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