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Mike Williams is an AutoCAD specialist who will help you to improve your competencies with AutoCAD 2010 and its new features.
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How to Change Screen Colours (video)
In this edition of “Mike’s Tips”, I’m going to answer a question I get asked about all the time: “How to change the screen colour”.
When I do my training videos, I often use a white background. This allows me to capture images better to place into a document.But when drafting, I’d prefer my Model Space background to be black and my Paper Space (Layout Tab) background to be white.
To set your background colour you need to access your Display settings found in the Options dialog box. You can get there by right clicking on the command line and selecting “Options”, then select the “Display” tab.
Now, this is where it is easy to get confused. People often see the “colour scheme” setting in the display tab and think this is where you set your screen background colour. The “colour scheme” setting only affects the colour of things such as your title bar, your status bar, and your ribbon outline. It does not affect your screen colour.
To change your screen colour, you need to select the “colour” button. I’m using AutoCAD 2010 in this example but this is basically been here for a while. First you pick the “context”. Right now, I’m in “2d model space” and so that’s the default. Then you can set the colour for the different interface elements. In this case, the “uniform background” (that’s basically the background of the screen). In the preview box, you can see you current colour. You can pick the desired colour from the drop down list. Like is said before, I like my model space colour to be black that’s what I select. If you’ve been using AutoCAD for a long time, this is probably what you are used to. I like to make my layout tab white so that I can see what my finished sheet will look like when plotted. You can set its colour by picking “sheet/layout” under “context” and then setting it’s background to be “white”.
You can scroll thru the different “interface elements” for each different context to see the items you have control over their colours. You can either pick a standard colour from the “Colours” tab drop down list, or you can pick “select colour” to access many different colour options. So, as you can see, you have the freedom to pick and choose colours to create a user interface that’s perfect for you.
