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Plotting in Vault to a PDF

7 REPLIES 7
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Message 1 of 8
jeff.noel
3055 Views, 7 Replies

Plotting in Vault to a PDF

So we often have to save our drawings as PDF's, typically we do this within Inventor with the Adobe PDF print driver.  Works great from Inventor, all the sheets save as one file.

 

A feature in Vault I really like is the Plot Manager, its ability to plot multiple drawings as once, and how it can find all the children drawings and plot them too, but there is one major flaw in it.

 

If I have a drawing that has multiple sheets, the plot manager adds each sheet seperately, so now when we try to plot them to PDF's using the Adobe PDF print driver, it makes each sheet a seperate PDF, which we would then have to combine after the fact into one PDF.  

 

Am I missing something, or is this a huge oversight in Vault?  Is there no way to have the plot manager make one multi-sheet drawing into one file? 

7 REPLIES 7
Message 2 of 8
S-K_TechPubs
in reply to: jeff.noel

I don't know if this will help as I'm very new to the Vault.

 

When I click on my search result it shows a preview below. The preview pane has a print icon (Looks JUST like the Plot icon above) that actually acts like a printer.

 

When I click on that icon it brings up the standard print screen which allows me to select my PDF printer.

 

Be warned: mine defaults to "Current Sheet" and I have to actually click the All Pages radio button. Also check your "Fit to page' as appropriate.

 

Hope that helps.

Message 3 of 8
jeff.noel
in reply to: S-K_TechPubs

Thanks,

 

That does work, but isn't really any different than if I opened the drawing and do a print from there, so it is the same functionality as before we had Vault.

 

The nice thing about the batch plotting is we can make pdf's of a bunch of drawings at the same time, and also we can add the drawing of an assembly to it, and have Vault automatically get all the children drawings, which is quite nice when working on new designs.  But quickly becomes pretty useless if each sheet wants to print as its own pdf.

 

I know Autodesk is pushing their dwf format hard with Vault, to replace using PDF's, but we just aren't quite there yet to do away with pdf's, so it would be nice to have a functioning solution for people that still use pdf's as well. 

Message 4 of 8
S-K_TechPubs
in reply to: jeff.noel

Darn, I'd hoped that would help you. 🙂

 

I've been trying to figure out a way to batch PDF files from the vault since I started using  it (all of 3 months ago).

 

I don't need much, really, just get the .dwg file in question and make it a PDF.

 

RIght now I can create a plot, but it just creates an xml file or something and I have no idea how I might use it for printing to pdf or hardcopy. In PDF, if it prints each one to a different file, that's cool by my.

 

I also posted to this forum a question for searching the vault using txt or spreadsheet input. I'm working with upwards of a few hundred documents.

 

On the other hand, sometimes we do want to print to hard-copy, any suggestions for how I can find out what I need to do to batch those successfully?

Message 5 of 8
hazlina
in reply to: jeff.noel

Hello jeff noel,

 

Just wanna get a feedback from you, did you manage to print PDF files from Vault that have multiple sheet in one document? Did you success?

I really hope you can share with me. Actually, I'm also in the trouble on how to get this successful.

 

Thank you. Hope to hear from you soon.

Message 6 of 8
hazlina
in reply to: jeff.noel

Hello jeff noel,

Just wanna get a feedback from you, did you manage to print PDF files from Vault that have multiple sheet in one document? Did you success?

I really hope you can share with me. Actually, I'm also in the trouble on how to get this successful.

Thank you. Hope to hear from you soon.

Message 7 of 8
smilinger
in reply to: jeff.noel

Not familiar with Adobe PDF printer, but I am using PDFCreator, it's free and you can set the printer to merge mode and waiting for all the documents printing complete, then you can merge all the documents into one or more PDFs as you want.

Message 8 of 8
hazlina
in reply to: smilinger

That was perfect.

 

Thank you.

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