Publisher does not display some Civil 3D data

[tdibiase87]

My drawings contain active linework, civil 3D data (contours, etc.), and references.

When a plot is executed without the publisher - everything appears normal. Specifically, all contours appear on plots and PDFs.

However, when plotting using the AutoCAD publisher (to batch many plots together, 70 or so plan sheets in 4 drawings) some Civil 3D data does not appear. Most contours are shown - however contours from a specific surface (existing ground surface) do not appear.

The publisher result is the same whether using a PDF driver or physical plot driver - these contours do not appear.

The style used to display the existing contours is used on other surfaces within the plot set - and oddly these contours appear on the publisher plot. However, no contours from this specific existing ground surface will display using the PUBLISHER.

Has anyone encountered an error like this? Are there alternative ways to batch plot a set of drawings that I can explore without further cost?

Thanks very much for any assistance you may offer. 

[sboon]

Is this surface part of the drawing being plotted or is it a data reference?

[tdibiase87]

The surface is brought into the drawing as a data reference.

There are no surfaces complied within the dwg begin plotted - all Civil 3D data has been data referenced - including other surfaces which print correctly, using the same style.

[mathewkol]

If you're publishing in the background, don't. This sometimes causes issues.

[sboon · Accepted solution]

Try this.  Set the contour style in the source drawing to match what you're trying to print then xref that drawing instead of using a data reference. 

[tdibiase87]

I attempted to print while not in background - same error result.

[tdibiase87]

I missed this comment - I'll give this a shot.

[tdibiase87]

This is an acceptable workaround - thank you for the solution.

The only drawback I can see so far is that we have drawn clip shapes and masks for this existing surface in these files to be plotted, and assigned these clip boundaries to our data referenced surface using the prospector commands in C3D. When we reference our surface as an xref - we lose these assigned clips, and must use additional AutoCAD commands to reassign them. I'm not sure how AutoCAD feels about clipping xref files - I will have to explore this further.

Thank you again.

[sboon]

It should work fine, just use the xclip command instead of the Civil3d surface clipping tools.

I wasn't sure that this would work.  I'm speculating here but I believe the problem is related to how C3d rebuilds the surface contours during a regen operation.  The problem is that the background publishing operation is one of the few processes in AutoCAD which uses multiple processors.  I believe that the contour rebuild is being assigned to one thread, and doesn't have time to complete before the rest of the regen, so it is left out of the final output to the printer driver.

[tdibiase87]

The existing surface is an aerial surface which spans a large swath on either side of miles of roadway - our largest surface by a long shot. The fact that this is the only surface that fails to print, while other smaller surfaces have no problems seems to lend itself to your theory. Thanks again for your help Steve.