Hi. We use AutoCAD for the preparation of structured circuit diagrams (we do not use AutoCAD Electrical at this time and that is not currently a preferred option).
A typical drawing will consist of many sheets (all separate dwg files). The assembled form of electrical components (showing the main article) will consist of contacts and references to other sheets. These references are usually called rungs and are the "columns" of the page.
Each sheet has typically 20 columns/rungs and there is extensive referencing between them. At the moment this is just "dumb text" but it could be made more sophisticated (e.g. an attributed block or a hyperlink). At the moment these are created and maintained manually.
For example:
I am looking for a solution to generate hyperlinks on a batch print of a pdf set to allow the end user to simply click on the references and go to the right sheet (page) of a batch plotted PDF set based on a pile of drawings (read pile of dwg files) and a DSD file.
Each drawing might have a different drawing number and title block (already part of the attribute) and sometimes the rungs might be fully qualified against a drawing title and the rungs or sheet number.
I am interested in recommendations as to the easiest way to go about providing navigation based on rungs, drawing numbers and sheet numbers.
AutoCAD 2018 (which we currently use) doesn't seem to support exporting object metadata to PDF. One option might be to create hyperlinks with the metadata and then post-process them with a third party script which examines each hyperlink and adjusts it correctly. It would still need to get the drawing number and sheet data somehow (which could be another hyperlink which gets scrubbed in post-processing).
I'd be interested in thoughts of suggestions as to AutoCAD extensions/packages/tools which would provide a simple way to achieve the outcome: combine PDFs and convert rung references into navigable hyperlinks for sets of single page dwg files. Almost any option for exporting and processing the metadata could be considered.
