Fade those References

One great feature in AutoCAD  (and Civil 3D) is the ability to control the amount of dimming of the Xref in the main drawing. Many times you would like the xref 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.

AutoCAD defaults to 70 as shown. 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.  This can also be controlled via the Options dialogue box as shown below.   How about using the aliaseditor or creating a macro to change those values on the fly?