Plot a Batch of multi-sheet PDFs with one Click

[FelixHH]

Hi AutoCAD community,

I'm looking for a more efficient workflow when plotting PDFs out of AutoCAD.

The company I'm with is creating electrical connection diagrams for a project with a large number of rooms in one dwg file per floor.

Every room consists of at least two A3 pages, sometimes more, and each page is set up on an individual layout in paper space.

A requirement is, to have an individual pdf for each room. This is especially handy for revisions as you just have to re-publish individual rooms instead of the whole floor.

BATCHPLOT offers the option to either plot a multi-sheet file which outputs all A3 pages into one large PDF, or plot each A3 page into a separate PDF. Both require a lot of manual combining or separating to get the PDFs we need to deliver.

We have set up Sheet Lists and grouped the associated room pages into sub-folders. This allows us to right-click and publish each multi-page room individually.
However it's still one click plus a long waiting time per room.

Any ideas on how to improve this time-consuming process very welcome!

Thanks a lot,

Felix

[pendean]

Explain " long waiting time per room" please? Do you have background publishing turned on? That can be slow.

FWIW one button magic means you have to do a lot more setup work ahead of time, for every project. It appears you started but having difficulties automating it all, is that correct?

Have you all explored using SSM yet? PUBLISH command alone is the hard way to do it all every single time, SSM (SheetSet Manager) lets you set up projects, subsets and PUBLISH much more quickly. Still not a one button click since the program alone can't guess at your intentions though.

[FelixHH]

Thanks pendean,

background publishing was indeed turned on by default and the plotting process is faster now that it's turned off. However, it's still lots of clicks until we've published PDFs for 100+ locations.

Setting up the SSM for each drawing and project is mandatory for us anyways to create files with the client's (rather long) file names. Our layout tabs have much shorter names. We have already grouped rooms with multiple pages into subsets as you can see in the screenshot.

I just couldn't find any function within SSM where it let's me publish everything at once, make a single page pdf if it's a single sheet, and make a multi-page PDF for subsets with multiple sheets inside.

[JTBWorld · Accepted solution]

You might find our JTB Batch Publish useful as it have more options for publishing available. 

[maratovich]

Sie haben mehrere identische Threads im Forum erstellt. Ich habe dir in einem anderen Thread geantwortet.

[pendean]

To "publish everything at once" you need to right-click at the top of the list to select the publish option, not where you show it

Right?

[FelixHH]

Of course, but that leaves me two options
A. Publish ONE pdf with all my sheets in the drawing
B. Publish x pdfs, one for each sheet in the drawing
which is the root of my problem.

What I was looking for is to publish a two-page (in this example) pdf for each subset of sheets without having to export each subset manually as shown in my screenshot.

[FelixHH]

Thanks Jimmy, that looks very interesting. I'll give it a try!

[Zlatislav.atanasov]

Hi, @FelixHH I would suggest you to take a look at AutoCAD Sheet Sets. This is a great tool that allows you to not only plot multiple drawings at once but also: Create an Automatic Sheet Table, Create a Project Archive, Edit your title block of all drawings at once, and more!
You can check the post I've written specifically for Plot Multiple Drawings in AutoCAD

Also, if you are interested, we have a complete tutorial on How to start working with AutoCAD Sheet Sets too!

[FelixHH]

Hi Jimmy, thanks again! Your Batch Publish Tool does exactly what we needed - batch publish for files with lot's of individual rooms and create a separate PDF for each subset, when previously defined in the sheet set manager.

I have two questions regarding the tool which might be interesting to other reading this thread:

1. Our drawings have a title block with attributes containing the dwg-number, room name, etc. Is there a way to use these attribute values to create the PDF file name (name of the subset) from them?

2. The PDFs created include bookmarks for each sheet of the subset. The tool seems to force the bookmark names to be all lower case however and doesn't just copy the writing format of the sheet's name. Is there a way to stop this behavior or, alternatively, de-activate the creation of bookmarks completely?

If you want, we can arrange a screen-share session which will make it easier to explain these fine details.

[JTBWorld]

Good to hear.

1. Yes you can. See this screenshot. Not in the middle at the bottom how you can specify a block and then above that you can use attributes from it to generate the file name.

2. These can be addressed. Can you contact me directly for further discussion? Send screenshot of the app so I can see what settings you use.

[FelixHH · Accepted solution]

Just wanted to share my workflow in case anyone is trying to solve the same problem and comes across this thread. I'm using JTB Batch Blot Version 4.3.0

- Create paper-space layouts for all relevant views/sheets

- Create a sheetset for all relevant DWGs

- Create subsets for all sheets that you want to publish in the same PDF file

- Subset-Name = PDF Filename / Sheet-Name = Name of a bookmark that is automatically created in the PDF

- Start the tool and load the .dst sheetset file you've created

- adjust plot settings as needed

- Choose the following Output Settings

• Plot to multi-sheet PDF files
• Merged by group
• For Sheets in SheetSet: Group under subset name

[maratovich]

Alle möglichen Optionen müssen berücksichtigt werden.
Es gibt noch eine weitere Option: Wählen Sie eine Datei aus und drücken Sie eine Taste. Alles wurde gedruckt. Alles.