AutoCAD Architecture

[#1]

We run a Canon ipf655... and as far as I can tell, it won't collate by itself - it gets its information from whatever application one's running.  In this case, we are running Autocad 2013.  I am trying to figure out a way to print an entire job (say, 30 sheets) without having to open up each and every page and print singly.  That's what we do now, and apparently have done for the last 15 years; so if my boss requests a copy of the yadda yadda set from 6 mos ago, we have to go back, open up the cover page, open up every other page, and print them in order.

Is there some way to either save all these individual pages as a "job" or something and then print that "job", or otherwise to instruct the program to print 30 pages in whatever order?  Each page is definitely set up differently, with different scales and window sizes and such, but it seems like once each page is set up to print properly, one should be able to print a slew of pages without such painstaking time spent.

Thank you loads for any advice.  If this one is possible, serious amounts of time will be saved at the office, and I'll get a few attalgirls as well

Liesl

[#2]

Look into Sheet Sets.

[#3]

If you are using Project Navigator you simply select all the sheets you need to print and "publish to plotter", if not, I dont have a solution.  Possibly Davids previous recommendation of sheet sets though I am not too familiar with that process.

[#4]

I always keep PDFs of my production drawings current, and archive the PDFs for each submittal. That way when they are needed, they are on hand. Makes you look good to your boss if they aren't savvy to your work flow! Check out Canon's web site for the drivers that are specific to AutoCAD, if you don't already have them. An old school way to print directly to the plotter is to open up the plotter's spooler and drag the pdfs in the order you want to print them.

As David suggested, use Sheet Set Manager (Project Navigator=SSM on steroids for ACA/AMEP) to on the fly publish directly to your plotter. You can use the page setup in each sheet, or override the page setup. ~ Mary

[#5 · Accepted solution]

The absolute simplest solution (without having to learn Sheet Sets or Proj Nav.) would be to just look into the Publish command.

If you have page setups for each drawing (since you said they're all different), then you can load them all into the Publish window, select the page setup for each dwg, and hit print (to whatever format you choose at that point)

To take it one tiny step further, save the Publish setup for a project into the project directory in a ".DSD" file. Then any time you need to print again later you can just load that .dsd file (note: a dsd file only will work with the specific page setups you selected and then saved to the dsd file. However if you want to change page setups you can still load the .dsd file and then change the page setups after it's loaded...at least you'll have the sheets loaded up in the correct order then)

[#6]

Sheet sets will be wonderful to use with page tags - when we add a page to a set we have to manually go in and change all of the appropriate numbers.  I haven't had the time to get in the details on that yet, but I'm actually looking forward to it.  And I don't even know what the project navigator is, but I'm feeling it will probably be handy.  Keeping pdf's up to date is a wonderful idea... and I really appreciate the image sent along as well.  And finally, the publish and save as a .dsd file is what really made my day.  That would have saved us *weeks* of man hours over the last few years.  Thankfully I've only been here a year before I got tired of the old way of doing things. 

Thanks to all.