Sheetset plots blocked by printer password entry

[b1_]

We have plotting system in our office that requires a jobnumber/password entry whenever you plot to A3 paper so the office can keep track of costs. This is fine for single plots that do not involve the sheetset manager (CTRL-P), but when you try batch plots (or single plots) through the Sheetset Manager with Page Overrides the "plot in background" icon never completes.

Has anyone come across this and come up with a solution (perhaps their printer driver was set up to accomodate sheetset batch plotting)? Is there a setting in the Sheetset file that allows you to enter password info?  Or is this situation just not fixable and the password entry stuff needs to be turned off for sheetset batch plots?

[pendean]

Nothing in AutoCAD's SSM or PUBLISH or PLOT will overcome your office's setup. Talk to your IT folks about options (perhaps they may insist you PULBISH to the built-in PDF driver then print?).

[b1_]

There is a less-than-optimal work around in AutoCAD, we turned off the "Publish in background" setting inside the "Publish" dialogue box. This gives the password-entry pop-up box back for each sheet, it just means when you batch plot it will cycle through the plot process and you have to enter the password for each sheet. We have 220 sheets though, and it's only the start of the job, so no grabbing a coffee while you batch plot.

I imagine if there is a one-password-entry-at-start-of-batch-plot solution it will come from the plot driver and software for the printer. Then again, perhaps there's an AutoLISP script I could write that enters the password for each sheet automatically. Sadly I do not know AutoLISP (and LISP doesn't work in AutoCADLT2015 anyway, which is what I'm using).

[b1_]

I am using AutoCAD 2021 Architecture full version, btw.

We are trying to avoid exploding the blocks, but will do that as a last resort.

To explain what we've go in this converted file further: all the blocks are on "some" layer , and all the lines and hatch inside that block are on the same layer that the parent block is assigned to.

We also had the problem that in this file everything had colour set manually rather than ByLayer. We used SETBYLAYER to fix that.

WHAT ABOUT THIS IDEA: could we us LAYMRG to set the layer of the block to 0 - for example, all the text (some text in blocks also) is on layer "A-Text", so use LAYMRG to merge layer "A-Text" into Layer "0", then after this recreate the "A-Text" layer and move all those text objects from layer "0" to layer "A-Text" - all the layers inside blocks should saty on layer "0" if I'm not opening them