AutoCAD tip: Dimmed XREFs

One of the new features in in AutoCAD 2010 (and Civil 3D 2010) is the ability to control the amount of dimming of the Xref in the main drawing. Many of you using one of more Xrefs in your drawing requested that these Xrefs be set to display differently so that the objects being designed are easier distinguished from the referenced data. Note that this is only visual and that your drawing will plot just like it should once you are ready to send it to the plotter. Now with the introduction of AutoCAD 2010 there is ability to control it with system variable called XDWGFADECTL. It defaults to 70 and if you attached your referenced drawing it will come up faded on the screen.

 

This variable has a range that goes from –90 to 90, and when XDWGFADECTL is set to 0 or negative value the fading is not turned on. So when XDWGFADECTL is in the range from 0 to 90 than fading percentage is applied.