To improve visibility of the plots, the layer fill patterns, colors, and other attributes are set separately and can differ from those normally displayed on-screen. These alternate colors, fill patterns, grid display, and layer visibility choices are in effect only when the Print command is active. The Set Color and Set Fill commands in the Attributes Menu work identically to the normal commands, however the alternate colors and fill patterns are set. The Set Grid command in the Attributes Menu allows modification of the grid style displayed in the plot. Layers can be made invisible (or visible) during plotting with button 2 selections in the layer menu. Changes made to these attributes can be saved to a new technology file with the Save Tech command in the Attributes menu.
It is possible to define layer presentation attributes specific to individual hardcopy drivers, and to suppress the use of the ``Alt'' attributes for individual drivers. This can be enabled by setting various parameters in the device driver blocks near the end of the technology file.
When in hard copy mode with a driver containing layer specifications, and one changes the fill pattern, color, or visibility status of a layer specified in the driver block, the layer specification in the driver block will be updated, and not the ``Alt'' layer.
The temporary file produced may be quite large in some cases. This file is created in the /tmp directory by default. If this directory has insufficient disk space (several tens of megabytes may be needed for a color Versatec plot) the XIC_TMP_DIR environment variable should be set to a path to a suitable directory.