More than one print per sheet of paper

[CCAP]

Does anyone know of a way to print sheets from AutoCAD onto one sheet of paper, side-by-side?

The reason this came up is because yesterday I printed a half size set on our new plotter using twice the paper I needed.  Each sheet printed on half of a 36”x12” sheet of paper (print is 18”x12”).  I was throwing away 18” per print.  What would be awesome is to be able to get another print onto that wasted 18”.

Do you guys have some secret as to how to get two (or more) prints on one sheet of paper?

Thanks!

Matt

[ntellery]

Check out the settings for the printer.  Depending on which one, modern ones have routines for stacking drawings to make better use of the paper.

[MarySeufert]

Also not an AutoCAD solution... If you create a multipage PDF of your sheets you can use the tile option when spooling it to the plotter. Hopefully you also have the option to order 18" rolls for the plotter, and then this problem is definitely gone!

~ Mary

[CCAP]

Yeah, after I posted this I did a little research and found that some printers have optimization or nesting options.  Unfortunately mine doesn't. 😕

The multi-page pdfs will let you do more than one sheet on a sheet of paper, but you can't control scaling.  I need the prints to be truly half-size.

I'm now looking at options like printing to pdf and writing a script for photoshop to combine the pdfs and print them.  But that may end up being a little too far over my head. 😄

[MarySeufert]

Depending on just how much time and effort you can spend on this, you could use design center to copy/combine layouts. I didn't suggest this at first since it could be a big mess. Then you have two sheets on one layout from which to print. Personally I would get a nice multi-page paper trimmer and just save the extra 18" scraps for scratch paper. Of course if we are talking about hundreds of sheets every day, this would be a pain too! After about two years in this industry I learned to embraced my inner tree killer.

~ Mary

[CCAP]

I have had some success now with putting together a routine in Photoshop to take PDFs from AutoCAD and combine them onto a sheet and print them.  It works prefectly as long as I only drop two pdfs into Photoshop at a time.  I haven't yet devised a way to drop 20 PDFs or perhaps have Photoshop process a folder full of PDFs.  We'll see if I can get that to work. 🙂

[MarySeufert]

Good luck, Don't have photoshop anymore to try it out....   ~ Mary