Batch Plot

[shoman24v]

Hey all Im new to the fourm and i have been wondering...I work over here for the City Of Fresno and we have street drawings that contain conduit, cameras, fiber optic and such... our current drawing is 113 pages long and is seperated by streets. My question is how can we plot the DWGs without actually selecting the DWG. can i maybe create a plot file that will print multipule maps at once without selecting anything.. kinda like a drag and drop i guess you could say.

thanks

[Matt Attallah]

I wish I could help - but if I rember from CAD class - can't you highlight what you want to print, right select and select plot? I am currently at my shop and do not have access to my labtop to help you any further..

Engineers...?

[shoman24v]

no, you have to physically select the plot area, and with 113 pages plotted out on ANSI D 2 times can be a real pain...... it takes about a day and a half to plot that much

[Matt Reiland]

Not totally sure of your question. You have 113 different .DWG files and you want to print them all out? For this I would use PlotIt which is a major enhancement to the Built In AutoCAD batchplot utility. If you are trying to do something else maybe you could explain it again.

http://www.m-c-2.com/main.htm

Also at work here, we have a directory set up and a computer that looks for .DWG files in a set directory. Anything you drop in there will automatically get plotted out.

Matt

[shoman24v]

Well what we have is 11 different DWGs. Each street is about 2-4 miles, and every page is seperated by a match line, we have mulitple viewports each including a title block and page number. What i want to be able to do is somehow drag (well say file number 2 out of 11) and print the 8 pages in the viewport connected to it without actually selecting each page in the layout view

I have a feeling that this is not possible...ill probably have to make a plot file of every viewport and then plot it....?

[Elgin Clock]

What version of AutoCAD?

As for an immediate solution.. Hire a temp for a week. That's what I did mostly when I worked as a drafter at my last job. We had print requests come in from everywhere and I had to plot them all. I think the largest job I had to do was about 70 C and D size prints. That was a 2 week job, (timed that way for sanity's sake) and the plotter was constantly being used those two weeks by myself and the other drafters in the department.

Another thing you have to think about is the amount of paper and ink you will be using to do this.. Is it really worth it in the end? (I'm assuming yes.)

That's a lot of paper rolls. And you said D size?? I hope Fresno has a paper mill nearby to buy out the entire warehouse's stock.

[Max Lobovsky]

I believe AutoCAD 2005 has actually the feature you want. It's called sheet sets. Check out this page: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet...112&id=4418386

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Shoman,
Unfortunately what you are asking Autocad to do is make your decisions for you and that is something it just can't do. You are asking to plot different parts of a drawing and different viewports and there is simply no provision for that. You can speed things up considerably if you plot what you need to file and then assemble the plot output from the files. Plotting to file is much quicker than straight plotting especially if the plotter has a small RAM or your network is busy. There are third party plotting programs you can use if the list from each drawing has the same parameters. Some blueprint houses will also offer the service for a fee that may be more cost effective than doing it all within the office. You just need to provide a copy of the drawing files.