Publish to PDF? Or Plot to PDF? How do you combine?

[Anonymous]

We've run into a little issue that seems to be not letting us go any further. I've written some VBA code to plot a file to a pdf, it works great, if it is a multiple sheet drawing it will output that many pdfs. To combine PDF's I used Adobe Pro's library and combined all the multiple sheets into one file as required.

All was good until we found out that Adobe Pro is not allowed to be installed on the server (where we need to be) and there's a hefty price for the server version.

Now back to the drawing boards, is there any way to create a multisheet pdf out of autocad without using a third party tool? For example, can it be done thru publish?

Thanks for your answers.

[Anonymous]

First, why are you using VBA to do this? this can be achieved through both the publish command and the sheet set manager, using these would also give you additional features. Also why not send files in DWF format, its better for consultants, and maintains sheet title information other useful items when coordinating with other offices. The only reason I can think to do this with VBA is to automate the addition of license/signature stamps to the PDF output

If you must use PDF:
While Autocad provides a DWG to PDF plot driver, its REALLY BAD. It produces huge bloated files. You could script to this, but you would at least have to flatten the PDF after creation.

There are many many FOSS (free and Open source software) applications which handle pdf creation. If you are looking for server side apps ghostscript is the OSS (open source software) standby, and you can do almost anything with it (not sure about enabling comments). If you have some moral dilemma with OSS PDF995 (its free, but has pop-ups on client machines, not sure about server installs) can be installed on a server and set to dump the PDF's to a static directory.

My office uses the sheet set manager or the publish command to plot to 'pdf redirect' (it is free, merges pdfs, and creates good files) on the client machines. Note: There are several other free (OSS & non OSS) pdf printers, this just seems to work for us.