Generate Outputs stuck in grayscale

There's no proper way of doing it (it's missing functionality.)

I described how you can work around the problem here:

Generate Outputs in Color

Thank you for the reply!  I've used full version of Altium at work for 20 years (back in the Protel days) and it's so hard to use a whittled-down version.  I've found most of what I need through other methods, but it's pretty painful.  I'll check it out when I get home tonight!

Andy

Like wise I used AD professionally, but now that I run a small business, when I get grumpy about using the cut down version I just think about the amount of money that hasn't left my wallet!

Any chance you can use a pdf printer like "cutepdfprinter" or something similar to make the color prints you need?

That's what I have been doing when I need to provide a color print to make it look more professional.  I do like the look of a color print much better than the greyscale.  The thing you lose is the ability to select components and nets in the bookmark section.

Yes, same situation and I feel the same way!

You are much better off just hacking the OutJob file, when you print to a PDF you're rending a image then compressing it.  The file size ends up much bigger (like 20x) and you loose the great capability of auto generating a complete and bookmarked document stack.

All you have to do is open the <project name>.OutJob in your favourite text editor and do a search and replace for "PrintKind=1" to "PrintKind=0". Save it and you're now generating colour docs.

I wrote a powershell script to do this, but since you only have to do it once per project I've never found it really any quicker than using a notepad++

At work, I developed our Altium templates;  we have an .outjob that travels with each project as a template file and the CS outjob doesn't exactly have this capability.  We start each PCB with a prjpcb, PCBdoc, several SCHdocs and outjob.  The outjob has been tailored to contain 4 output containers towards our release process; 2 for PCB release and 2 for assembly release.  It's a one stop shop outjob for our company and since we've got 50+ people using our floating seats, we have to simplify where we can for drawing release consistency.

I opened the CS outjob file to try and tweak it so I could keep the project out settings common to my typical jobs, but got lost in all the stuff in there.  I'm specifically talking about setting up an outjob for  Schematic generation appended to a  specific PCB view (specific layers and with some draft view settings to make some stuff clear) and then gerber layers.  I would set up templates for a 2, 4 and 6 layer boards.  I messed with this during the first board I was working on in December.  I've since resorted to setting up each outjob on it's own (on my 4th board now) and it's not so bad, but I know i'm going to miss a detail on one of these jobs...

My question is, what's your outjob workflow in CS since you're familiar with the power of output containers?  Have you found a good way to make a "Template" outjob?  I made one, but it retained some details of the original project it was associated with.  When it made the outputs folder, it kept the name of the original project, etc and didn't do what I was hoping it would.  I guess I could dig around till I made it work the way I wanted to, but haven't been motivated to attack that yet.

Thanks

Andy

I haven't got anything thoroughly worked yet, but the most promising thing from my perspective is to setup a template outjob then use simple powershell (or whatever floats your boat) scripts to replace the text elements necessary for each new project.

So far the only way I've found to work with CS outjobs is a combination of setting stuff up roughly how I want it in the dialogs then modifying the outjob file to finish it off.  There's just too much missing from the CS outjob dialogs.  Also the outjob file is very easy to modify since it's all human readable text.

I was scared of messing with the text in there, but running two simple find and replace functions in Notepad++ does exactly what I need!  Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, you killed two birds with one stone!  I had to tweak both the outjob and the prjpcb file to make it work. 

I know extremely little about scripting, but I have several coworkers that can fix me up.

thanks!

Andy

Page Setup dialogs are being added to CircuitStudio in the up coming version 1.4. In the mean time it's no problem for you to hack the OutJob file carefully as described by harvie256 as this won't conflict with the up coming feature.

Best regards,

James Harriman

Altium