AutoCAD: Using the PUBLISH command

Vice President of Autodesk Labs, Brian Mathews, taught an Autodesk University 2006 class entitled "Building Custom DWF-based GIS Applications for Mobile Field Force Workers." In his class, Brian shared some tips related to the AutoCAD PUBLISH command.

The PUBLISH command was introduced in AutoCAD 2004. It allows you to:

• Select a set of source DWG files. Their respective Model space and/or Layout pages are added to the list of sheets to publish to DWF.
• Reorder or Delete the sheets in the list to publish. The page order in a Multi-page DWF will match the order in the PUBLISH list box. You can re-arrange the order by selecting or multi-selecting sheets in the list and dragging-and-dropping them.
• Use either the page settings (PC3) defined with the Layout (default) or override with a given page setup. For example: your layouts might be defined as color on E-size but you can have PUBLISH override with a B-size Black-and-White PC3 file.
• You can save your Publish job selections for future use in an ASCII DSD file. Both the PUBLISH command and the DSD job settings are scriptable.
• With one-click you can "run" your PUBLISH job and make either a single multi-page DWF or multiple single-page DWF files (depending on your Publish Options settings).

Drag-and-Drop
You can Drag-and-Drop sets of DWG files into the PUBLISH dialog from Windows Explorer. This makes it easy to batch publish an entire directory of files to DWF. Once in the list, use Drag-and-Drop to reorder the sheets.

Publish Options
When using the PUBLISH command there are two different places that determine the settings used for the DWF. First the PUBLISH dialog has a Publish Options... button which includes basic settings. Second, the DWF6 ePlot.PC3 file has the more advanced settings. Some settings may conflict between these two locations (such as Layer inclusion). In the case of a conflict, the PUBLISH Options... settings take precedence when using the PUBLISH command.

Comments

[Carol Perez]

Where do we find the DWF6 ePlot.PC3? We are exploring the use of DWF vs PLT files. When we use Publish and create the DWF file, we cannot plot the files on our in house plotter (Savin 4700WD) until we convert the DWF file to TIFF images. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Scott Sheppard]

Mine was installed when I installed AutoCAD 2007. My DWF6 ePlot pc3 file was actually located in C:\Documents and Settings\sheppas\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2007\R17.0\enu\Plotters