Creating Simple .pdf Assembly Instructions from Inventor

[Anonymous]

I am currently using Inventor 2016 to create assembly models and am looking for a way to create graphical assembly instructions from these models that can be saved as pdf and printed.

What I've tried:

• Inventor's integrated 'create .ipn' tool: Good for tweaking explosions of models but when I go to save as .pdf format I get just a one page document with the current view in place. I want several pages each with different levels of explosion.
• Inventor Publisher: Was good for creating video animations but when I exported storyboards to .pdf I found that they were rigidly defined under headings, subheadings etc. This made it look too technical a document and the shots would never take up more than a third of the A4 page. Furthermore Publisher crashed continuously - resulting in annoying losses of work.
• Saving screenshots or exporting individual views as images: Time consuming and seems a pretty archaic way of doing things. Also results in loss of picture quality and pixelation.

Am I missing some obvious built in features the Autodesk Design Suite Premium package contains? Surely there is a way to drag and drop assembly views onto A4 pdf pages? Essentially I am looking for something which will let me produce .pdf documents with assembly views that fill the A4 pages like the photograph attached of IKEA assembly instructions. Any ideas?

[Anonymous]

I've just rewatched the Inventor Publisher overview video at http://www.autodesk.com/products/inventor-publisher/overview

How can I save my snapshots as clipboard pieces which can be dragged and dropped into a word document (as seen at 2:41 in video)? This could be my solution, provided publisher doesn't crash continuously.

Thanks,
Jack

[mflayler · Accepted solution]

Microsoft Word has an integration piece for Publisher that will do this.  In Word you will simply have a new Tab at the top of the screen and when you load your Inventor Publisher project, each snapshot will appear for placement.

You may have to repair your installation of Publisher for the Word plugin to show up and I depending on your version of Publisher there was a hotfix or two around this as well.

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-publisher/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2015...

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-publisher/publisher-word-add-in-does-not-work-after-installin...