Publish trouble - ACE 2008

[userlevel6]

When I attempt to Publish To .DWF, I cannot get ACE 2008 to make separate .DWF files, nor can I get it to put the .DWF files where I want them, in the project folder, in a DWF sub-folder. Selecting the appropriate items in the DWF publish dialog has no effect! Regardless of what I have selected, my .DWF files end up in a multi-sheet .DWF, somewhere in a temporary subfolder of C:\Documents and Settings\(my username).

Also along the way, I learned that I cannot turn on Automatic DWF publish in the ACAD configuration dialog and expect it to do that job during a Project-Wide Utilities, Run Command Script, with only a QSAVE in the command script. I think this is because Project-Wide Utilities apparently, internally, sets SDI mode to 1 - single drawing compatibility - which is incompatible with Automatic .DWF generation. (correct me if I'm wrong here!)

To allow me to quickly produce single-sheet .DWF files, in a DWF sub-folder of my project files, I've used the attached script (change the .txt to .scr), which works fine with Project-Wide Utilities, run command script.

Hope this can help others too - just be aware that this script will only work if there is a DWF folder in the drawings location, and also that it references .ctb and .ps3 files that will have to exist somewhere in the Plotter Support pathways. I would much rather have used Plot/Publish, but it appears to have some bugs!

[userlevel6]

What didn't work on one project did work on the next! The project I was working with yesterday had trouble making .DWF's from a couple of drawings due to some quirkiness with a raster image pasted into modelspace. If my raster image is scaled such that it's edges are too close to my viewport in paperspace, the Plot process resizes the image on the fly, but only for the plot - doesn't change the actual drawing. Anyway, the end result of ACE 2008 trying to make a .DWF from these drawings, was an ACAD hang and/or fatal error. Due to this error, the "temporary" .DWF's that were generated never got to their final filenames & destinations in my project folder.

Repeating the Publish to .DWF on a smaller project today DID do exactly what I told it to do.

Oh well, at least I learned something - and got a quick-plot toolbar button from the exercise...

[sven_kloeck]

There is a system variable that controls whether publishing drawings is a single job or multiple jobs. It's called "PUBLISHCOLLATE". Change it to 0. Maybe this will also do the trick

Sven Kloeck
Electrical Network Design

[userlevel6]

Thanks, I'm sure that knowledge will come in handy!

[lkirkup]

I had all sorts of problems publishing to DWF with ACE2008.
Turns out that where it wants to place the sheet set description file is too deep in the directory structure and once the total length of characters gets too long, windows spits it and it wont run the publish command.
eg. C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD Electrical 2008\R17.1\enu\Support\User\7603-plant area 02 - mcc 02-mc-013.dsd
this is just too long. So I moved the user directory to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\User\ re-mapped it in the wd.env file and now I don't have any problems with publishing to DWF.

Note that with projects that had a shorter title this problem didn't happen it was only with the longer project names that this happened. So the fact that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't made it hard to find out what was going wrong.

Maybe AutoDesk needs to look at putting the user directory in another location to avoid this problem.

[userlevel6]

We set up our ACE 2008 systems to point to a simpler directory structure for user configurable files - c:\acade\work and c:\acade\Support for all the other support files. Sometimes simpler IS better after all! heh heh

The problem I was having was actually related to OLE-embedded images. For some reason, when they are too close to my Viewport, ACADE re-sizes the images during the plot, and only for the plot. I had other weird errors from this too, like having some of my .DWF files come out with a blank space where one of these images should have been. ACE 2006 didn't have this issue when I created these drawings, but when called up in ACE 2008, some of these behaved very badly and crashed my project-wide .DWF publish. When I re-sized my port to allow more space around the images, all worked just fine.

I still have an issue with a FIELD in my titleblocks though. This FIELD is supposed to update every time the drawing is plotted. With automatic .DWF generation turned on, the change happens just fine, but it isn't saved with the drawing unless I .qsave again! I understand it, but I don't see a way around it yet.

When .qsave is invoked, the drawing is immediately saved, then the plot-date FIELD is updated, then the .DWF file is created. This needs to be the other way around - .qsave FIRST should change the field if .DWF generation is turned on, then generate the .DWF, then actually save. Slight bummer!

[sven_kloeck]

Some time ago I've asked about this on the forum and someone of autodesk replied. He said they may log the issue.
this is the reply: http://discussion.autodesk.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5505804

Sven Kloeck
Electrical Network Design