Expert: Bob - 2/27/2008

Question
Dir Sir,

I have about 12 years experience in AutoCAD.  I work as an Arc. Coordinator for a design build company.  We just started to use a secondary print shop for managing our big  projects and they require all of our drawings to be in .pdf format.  We set up a publish to save all drawings into .pdf format.  When other people use this command it saves each inividual drawing as .pdf into a selected file.  The publish seems to be working fine for everyone except for me.  I am also the only person using version 2008 of AutoCAD (the rest are using 2007).  When I publish the AutoCAD drawings to my computer it puts all the publish drawings into one file, rather than saving them as seperate files.  Is there a setting that could change this?  Or any other method that I could save my AutoCAD drawings into seperate .pdf drawings using the publish command?

Thanks,
Fred DiBlasio


Answer
Hi Fred-- let me see how much I can help, as I dont use the feature.

1- It is important to remember that you are PLOTTING to pdf, not saving, converting, etc.

2--This is the first time I have heard of a print shop wanting pdfs, not plt files (which I prefer).

3--i think you mean, rather than ___When other people use this command it saves each inividual drawing as .pdf into a selected file. ___-- when others publish, all the pdfs created go into one FOLDER. (a pdf is itself a file)

4 -- Am I reading that on your machine, your result is one big pdf, with images (a pdf is more or less an image) of all the AutoCAD sheets on one pdf)??????????????  Does it do so by making a separate page within the pdf for each AutoCAD sheet (which seems just fine to me, better than each pdf as a separate file in a folder)=== or do you mean you get a 1-page pdf with images of all the sheets???? (which is no good)

5-- Sorry, I cant take the time (maybe hours) to go over all the possible settings and guess what you did wrong -- no bell rang for me on an obvious one error. BUT, even before writing the question, in your spot I would have thoroughly looked over OPTIONS and all the dialog boxes along the way to see what setting is different from the 2007 machines.  My guess is that there is a checkbox to plot all to one multipage pdf, at least in 2008, and yours is checked.

So go over it carefully -- if you dont find where you went wrong, post the question in the AutoCAD print group and someohe who uses that every day will help you.
__________http://discussion.autodesk.com/forum.jspa?forumID=30

Bob