AutoCAD 2016 – Half Tone Gridlines

By John Flanagan 

About locking and fading layers in AutoCAD

Introduction

Sometimes grid lines can be a bit too dominant in plan drawings. In a recent training course a delegate asked me if there was a way to halftone gridlines in AutoCAD. 

Solution

Two steps are involved:

Step 1:

First you have to lock the appropriate layer (in this case S-Grid). The layer is highlighted in Fig 1 on the layer drop down list. The Lock layer tool location is highlighted on Fig 2.

Step 2:

Type fade and press enter on the keyboard and enter a new value (an integer between -90 and 90), press enter again (see Fig 5). The appearance of the gridlines should change. Try typing several different values to get the tone you want.

After you type fade and press enter follow the command prompt to enter a new value. In this example I entered a value of 70. The before and after appearance of the gridlines is illustrated in Figs 3 & 4 above.