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About Archicad's documenting tools, views, model filtering, layouts, publishing, etc.

publishing errors

Dave Brach
Advocate
Ever since I started using 19, occasionally when I try to publish a series of Layouts, the last layout fails to publish. when I click on it I get the generic message "item cannot be published. may be in use by another application or person". I try to delete the layout in the publisher set and transfer it over again. I also try to just re-name it but it still refuses to publish.

Screen Shot 2015-09-05 at 2.15.54 PM.png
Dave Brach/architect
AC26 MBP OS Ventura
AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4 GB
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB
12 REPLIES 12
Dave Brach
Advocate
after more investigation I see that this happens when I publish to PDF as a single file and it is trying to overwrite an existing pdf. The only solution is to rename the file, or go and delete the existing file. Normally archicad overwrites an existing file but not in this case unfortunately.
Dave Brach/architect
AC26 MBP OS Ventura
AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4 GB
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB
Barry Kelly
Moderator
Try taking the "#" symbol out of the name.
When ever I have trouble publishing the first thing I look at is the characters used in the names.

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
Dave Brach
Advocate
the # doesn't make a difference (I actuallly added that in to see if renaming the layout made a difference) The problem is that when publishing multiple layouts and saving them all as a single pdf file, if the file name already exists then the last layout will fail to publish, instead of just overwriting the file.
Dave Brach/architect
AC26 MBP OS Ventura
AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4 GB
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB
Barry Kelly
Moderator
It should overwrite unless the PDF file is open.
At times though I have fond that just having the file selected in Windows Explorer (not sure what you call the Mac equivalent) is enough to make Archicad think the file is open.

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
NCornia
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
Dave,

In the past I have seen cases where if a user on a Mac publishes a PDF; opens it in Preview; and then simply closes the PDF without Quitting Preview this error could happen. Even after the PDF file itself has been closed Preview continues to send a signal that it has the PDF in use. After the user quit Preview completely the publisher would work fine and overwrite the existing copy of the PDF without issue. I believe the problem was prevalent in a previous version of OS X/Preview. To my knowledge this is not a common issue with recent releases of Preview.

Are you using Preview? If so, is it the version of Preview (8.0) that ships with OS X 10.10? Or maybe you are using a previous version of Preview? If you Quit your PDF viewer and then publish from ARCHICAD does the problem occur?

Best regards,
Nicholas Cornia
Technical Support Team - GRAPHISOFT North America
ARCHICAD on Twitter
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GRAPHISOFT Help Center
Eduardo Rolon
Moderator
If I remember correctly using QuickLook, selecting the file and using the spacebar, might also cause this.
Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

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

Katalin Borszeki
Graphisoft
Graphisoft
We have contacted the user and believe that NCornia's answer has solved the issue. Tx
Katalin Borszeki
Implementation Specialist
GRAPHISOFT

http://helpcenter.graphisoft.com - the ArchiCAD knowledge base
DGSketcher
Legend
On Yosemite if the file is displayed in Finder and showing a preview it will cause this. Open the Finder window and switch to a different directory to free up the file. Close preview if you are viewing the file as well.
Apple iMac Intel i9 / macOS Sonoma / AC27UKI (most recent builds.. if they work)
Anonymous
Not applicable
I've got a similar problem. When trying to publish and overwrite an existing pdf I get an error message saying "A-43.4-001 was published successfully, but has been renamed as: ___." and no PDF is created. Only a file with no file extension named ___.

The problem is solved if I go to Publisher set properties and browse for the path and just click OK on the same path I used before. But it is a bit annoying to do this every time I open the file.

The problem is in Archicad 18 and I'm on a Mac with OSX 10.9.5
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