Batch Printing certain IDW's out of multiple page file

[Anonymous]

I have searched and cannot figure a way to do this. I want to print multiple pages from seperate idw's that are going to the same location in our shop.

For example: I have 3 different idw's with 20 pages a piece. I want to print all the pages that are sheet metal. There may be (3) pages in the first idw, (1) in the second idw, and (5) pages in the last idw. I want to print them all at one time without having to go in and individually select each one.

I was thinking of adding a custom iproperty or unique identifier in the category (under Category in iprops - Sheet Metal) and say "Print all sheet metal pages!" and it magically do that. There has to be a way, but I think I am overlooking it.

Thanks for the help!

[MechMachineMan]

Yeah you can.

Step 1: Select/Open .idw's with sheets to be printed.
Step 2: Identify/Grab sheets to be printed.
Step 3: Print them.

The printing of sheets if probably the most complicated out of it all. You should just be able to use print manager.
To select/open the idws, use the FileDialog commands.
To select the sheets, just iterate through the sheets and have a check. If it passes, just have a call to print the sheet. Then move on to the next sheet.

Your check can be an added identifier or you can access the model and use ObjectType() to check if the document is a Sheet Metal Document Object.

I suggest using the Programming help from within inventor and the samples they have there and on here to proceed.

Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for you reply but that isnt quite what I was trying to do. I want to get away from having to sort thru the pages and see which ones I want to print. I want to be able to pick a 'category' and tell it to print those individual pages out of a multiple page IDW. I think it would be along the lines of writing some code or creating a macro. I was considering trying to see if Adobe Acrobat has a feature that can print certain pages that have a label out of a multiple page print.

Is this making sense?

Thanks,

-mike

[Anonymous]

The tip that MechMachineMan gave is the one to do the job.

I use it myself to print all the printable pages in a set of files.

What you could do is name the sheets in a certain category using a pattern: SheetMetal:1, SheetMetal:2, etc

Than trasversing all the sheets of the drawings, check if the name of the sheet contains "SheetMetal" and print it.

[MechMachineMan]

Ha! Mike, my answer was just vague. I didnt mean you have to select each sheet with the mouse. I meant that you need to implement some system to identify the sheets and some sort of algorithm to go by, rather than just "I want it to pick sheets for me".... What sheets? What are the exceptions? What outliers? etc...

[rjay75]

You need some method of identifying the drawing sheets. If you have a lot of existing files that you want to use look to see if there are identifying info on the parts to use.

For instance with the sheet metal sheets.

Loop through each sheet in a drawing. On each sheet look to see if it has a drawing view and look to see if the model on the sheet is a SheetMetal Part. If so print the sheet using the DrawingPrintManager. If you only have a few papersizes you print to you can have the printers and papersize selection hard coded.

I had a program that mapped sheet sizes to specific printers. This was the method I used. Looping through each sheet and if enough information met the criteria submit a print job for the individual sheet.