Publish Plotmaker layouts to dwg - why doesn't it work?

[Paul King]

For some reason, I cannot successfully publish drawings to DWG or DXF from Plotmaker

I can publish the same drawing successfully to PDF, DWF, or any other format .

Publishing to DWG & DXF, Plotmaker reports that layouts have published correctly - but the result can never be re imported by plotmaker, ArchiCAD or AutoCAD

I can save an individual plotmaker or ArchiCAD drawing out successfully as DWG or DXF, and can publish to DWG or DXF from ArchiCAD.

However, I cannot seem to Publish to DWG or DXF from plotmaker (i.e presumably where model & paperspaces are combined)

Whenever I try to reimport such a DWG or DXF, I get an error message saying "nothing to import, or file could not be interpreted". The files produced have a definite size which changes depending on source, so I suspect the latter.

Also, if in Plotmaker I tick the radio button to import the paperspace, I do successfully get elements of any titleblock that were exported. But nothing I do allows me to import modelspace elements into either plotmaker or ArchiCAD if they were processed by Plotmakers publisher.

In that this same result is found from two separate freshly installed copies of AC9/Plotmaker, all default settings, fresh test projects, I have to wonder what is going on??

How can I correct this?, What could I be doing wrong?

Would greatly appreciate an ideas or assistance!!



Cheers

Paul King

[Ben Odonnell]

Paul,
Try importing them into ArchiCAD and choose the "Paperspace with empty viewports" option.

HTH.
Cheers.
Ben

[Paul King]

Hi Ben - thanks for the suggestion

I tried it, but it made no difference.

I suspect it is not the importing that is the problem, but the exporting - because AutoCAD cannot open them either

Exporting layouts to dwg used to work under 8.1 with no such issues
and it works fine under 9.0 for all other formats except dwg & DXF

Can anyone else duplicate the problem? - remembering the DWG must be as published from a Plotmaker layout rather than direct from a ArchiCAD/Plotmaker drawing

Hope someone can help!

Cheers

Paul

[Anonymous]

Paul wrote:

I suspect it is not the importing that is the problem, but the exporting - because AutoCAD cannot open them either

Exporting layouts to dwg used to work under 8.1 with no such issues
and it works fine under 9.0 for all other formats except dwg & DXF

Can anyone else duplicate the problem? - remembering the DWG must be as published from a Plotmaker layout rather than direct from a ArchiCAD/Plotmaker drawing

Hope someone can help!

Cheers

Paul

I believe there is a problem with the import. We were getting errors and blank files when opening a dwg file created from plotmaker. But when I opened the file on our PC with Autocad the file came in correctly.

[Paul King]

Hi Millard

You are quite right is an importing issue
I took the various recipients word for the fact that the files won't open in AutoCAD for them , but after installing a temporary copy on my own machine, I can open with AutoCAD 2004 - though the result does not appear in modelspace

Some recipients do not have AutoCAD as such, but need DWG for import eg. into Vectorworks, and they presumably have the same importing difficulty with merging paper & modelspace that ArchiCAD does - so this is still a definite problem

Cheers

Paul

[Djordje]

This means you will have to save all from PlotMaker into ModelSpace.

Beware: if the people are to use those DWGs for further work, you have to export scaled. That is to say, not 1:1, but 100 times larger if it is for 1:100, and so on.

If you export 1:1, which is a default for standard PaperSpace export, your ModelSpace entities will be scaled accordingly, not in the units that they are supposed to be in.

Clear as mud on a rainy day, huh?