BIM Coordinator Program (INT) April 22, 2024

Find the next step in your career as a Graphisoft Certified BIM Coordinator!

Modeling
About Archicad's design tools, element connections, modeling concepts, etc.

PDF's and Printing

Anonymous
Not applicable
Can I duplicate or use the same publisher set for printing as well as saving/exporting as PDF's?

What I did on my first project was have a set for publishing to PDF and one for printing with my print settings., it was an identical set but I am conscious that they're independent of each other.

One other thing, for applying print settings, can it be done to multiple layouts at once i.e. apply print settings to all A1's at the same time?
9 REPLIES 9
Anonymous
Not applicable
I think you would need two publisher sets.

As a way of being sure what we distribute is recorded and is checked we always print from PDF as sometime things may differ when printing directly from ArchiCAD vs printing from PDF and it is the PDF drawings that form the contract documents.

Scott
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thanks Scott, I just wanted to check I wasn't missing anything. Seems a shame that I can't link them.

I appreciate the benefit of printing from the PDF's for consistency, I just tend to prefer to print from within Archichad, maybe I should change my workflow. I'd be interested to here what others prefer.
Barry Kelly
Moderator
I too would recommend publishing the PDFs and then printing from those PDFs.
That way you know they are the same.
Also anyone can print the PDF where as only someone with an Archicad license can print directly from Archicad - and that could be a hassle.

You can still create two publisher sets if you really want.
So long as they are a "shortcut" from your layout pages they will update automatically as your layouts change and should both remain identical but in different formats (print/PDF).

Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thanks. I'll alter my workflow so that I'm printing from PDF then.

What do you do for bath printing from PDF please? Previously I thought that it would be best to have the different paper sizes etc set up in Archicad and just set it plotting?
Eduardo Rolon
Moderator
When you publish to PDF there is an option to "combine PDFs" which will output 1 file with all the pages and that is the one you print.
Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB ram, OS X 10.XX latest
another Moderator

Anonymous
Not applicable
ejrolon wrote:
When you publish to PDF there is an option to "combine PDFs" which will output 1 file with all the pages and that is the one you print.
Thanks but what about when the layouts vary from A4 to A1?
Eduardo Rolon
Moderator
AFAIK when you print a CD set all sheets should be the same size.
Anyway…
There are printers that can change paper size on the fly.
If you don't have one of those then you would Publish a PDF set for each paper size.
Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB ram, OS X 10.XX latest
another Moderator

Barry Kelly
Moderator
I split my documents based on the layout size.
I combine (Merge) the PDFs that are the same size by ensuring each page size has its own folder.
These can then be added via 'Shortcut' to separate publisher sets or even the same publisher set.
The trick is to merge the parent folder for each page size so you get one PDF per page size.

This is handy if you print say A3 to one printer and A2/A1 to another.
if as Eduardo says your printer can handle different page sizes on the fly then you could combine to one PDF.

I find the page orientation doesn't matter so I have portrait and landscape of each size in the one file.

Barry.
One of the forum moderators.
Versions 6.5 to 27
Dell XPS- i7-6700 @ 3.4Ghz, 16GB ram, GeForce GTX 960 (2GB), Windows 10
Lenovo Thinkpad - i7-1270P 2.20 GHz, 32GB RAM, Nvidia T550, Windows 11
Anonymous
Not applicable
Mixed sized layouts should not present a problem when printing as long as you have the check box selected to use the paper size specified in the file and not scale to fit selected.
Additionally you do not have to combine files into a single file to print, you can simply select files in explorer (or Finder on Mac) and press Control+P (Command+P) and files will print using your default PDF program to your default printer

Scott
Learn and get certified!