Expert: Scott Cook - 2/12/2008

Question
Hello Scott,

I am a very novice user of AutoCAD2008.  Would you be able to provide a little help on creating a hotkey that will automatically create a pdf file? (We use CutePDF printer to create the pdf files, but I don't know how to automate it.  We also would like to use the pdf as a source file for another separate program we wrote that uploads the pdf to our Change Management system.  So I guess the second question would be: how to launch a separate program from AutoCAD.

Answer
I wrote a program called Plot2000 that makes plot macros. It also does batch plotting, and it does work with cutepdf because I also use that. You can download it from www.plot2000.com and evaluate it for 30 days.
As far a launching an external program, plot2000 won't do it..

You could write another macro to do the external process by customizing your acad.pgp file. Search your hard drive for it to see where it is. Or better yet, inside autocad at the command line type this:
(findfile "acad.pgp")
It will tell you where the acad.pgp file is that autocad is using. You can open it in notepad to add a macro to it.