changing colors in viewports

Thanks to your replies I have learned to work with PaperSpace.
I created our office's first Paper Space project this last week.
We've been working in Model space forever, (myself for the last
6 1/2 yrs). However I've run into a snag today. My boss wants
the overlapping areas around matchlines to be grayed out in color.
I would just as well clip the viewport at the matchline but he likes
to show some of the adjoining sheet on each sheet but he wants
it grayed in color. The only way I can figure to do this (we are
all still working in R-14 even though we have LDD 2000i in office)
is to copy the area and paste it into paperspace (after clipping the
viewport) and gray out everything. The problem here to me is
the main reason I wanted to move to paper was to "keep" the
layout (civil engineering) in tact and not have to split it up. If
I have to start copying things out of the layout then come
revision time I'm still going to have to recopy or re-edit everything
that is not in the main layout. Is there a way to work around
this ?

 

Until autocad comes up with a way to make a viewport-specific color change,
the way you're proposing doing this is probably simplest.

One other way you could do it, but would require copying your model-space
drawing:

Do a "Save As" on your current drawing (for example, if your drawing is
called Model.dwg, save it as Model-Copy.dwg.) Then, XREF Model-Copy.dwg
into Model.dwg. You will now basically have 2 copies of the same model
space stuff on top of each other in model space. Go into layer manager and
change all of the Model-Copy XREF dependant layers to a color or linetype
that will print "greyed out". Now go into your viewport in Paper Space and
freeze all those same XREF layers in it. Then, create a new viewport, zoom
to same scale as original viewport, and line them up by snapping to
reference points. Now stretch the new viewport as needed to line up with
your matchlines, and stretch them a bit past as you need. Now go into the
new viewport and freeze all layers EXCEPT the Model-Copy XREF layers (and of
course the layer you inserted the XREF on.) You can then add viewports as
needed for every matchline, following the same method. The biggest drawback
is every time Model.dwg changes you have to remember to update
Model-Copy.dwg as well.

HTH,
Ben