Using Publisher to Print drawings

[Anonymous]

I'm currently working on a large project where drawings need to be issued as 'hard copy' and the sets are a mix of A1 and A3, requiring to be printed on different printers.

So I'm using 'Publisher' to batch print, which saves me from having to change the Page Set-up between printing A1s and A3s.

Or so I thought.

I encountered 2 problems:

1. When I added an A3 drawing to a set of A1 drawings - all the print settings for the A1 drawings already in the set changed to A3, defeating the object of the exercise.
Surely this should not happen.

2. When I scroll through a publisher set to check the settings for each drawing, I have to a) select the drawing, b) click on Page Setup, c) click on Print Settings, and do this for every drawing.
Surely it should be possible to display the page-setting and print set-up for each drawing as it's selected in the list, the way that Navigator displays the properties of each layout.

[DGSketcher]

You can create a publish by master set which may help.

Open the organiser window and create a new publisher set to suit your publishing locations etc.

In the Organiser window you need the new publisher set open on the right and layouts on the left. At the top you will likely see a line "Tree by subset" with a black arrow at the far right. Click on the arrow and you can select "Tree by master". You can then click on a master folder containing your layout drawings. Go down to the bottom of the folder window and immediately below is a button to "Add shortcut", do so and you will then have a folder that will update as you add or delete layouts listed by paper size. You can then fine tune the folder (not layouts ) to suit your PDF requirements.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice.

If I understand you correctly, applying your method I'll wind up with, say, 2 publishing sets: 1 for A1 drawings and 1 for A3 drawings.

This is a reasonable workaround, but not as good having a single list which contains all the construction drawings, from which I can then pick the ones I want to print, regardless of the paper size.

It seems odd to me (and a bug, surely?) that the paper size and printer attributes don't "stick" to the layout.

[Anonymous]

I've had another look at this issue. It's not getting any better!

DG's method got me a set of A1s - all setup for A1 paper size, and destined for the A1 printer - good!

Later I added another drawing to the set. But I'd forgotten that, in the meantime I'd printed a detail on the A3 printer. So my new drawing has an A1 page setup, and is assigned to the A3 printer.

And - here's the thing - so now are all the other drawings in the set.

I now have a choice:
a) go through the whole list and re-assign the printer to each drawing one by one, or
b) send one drawing to the A1 printer, to re-establish that printer as the default and then re-assemble the list from scratch.

The publishing list does not allow me to select multiple drawings and assign them all to the same paper size or the same printer.

This is surely not how it's supposed to work!

[DGSketcher]

Keith, I approach this slightly differently by the looks of things.

I would only maintain 1 publisher set for all the master drawings.

The subfolders can output PDFs to separate files containing all the relevant pages e.g. all the A1 pages would be in one file, A2 pages in another file etc. You can then simply open the relevant PDF and send it to the relevant printer.

I'm still coming to terms with the new change manager but I think you should be able to do something similar so you are only publishing altered drawings to the PDF files as well.

Publisher is quite versatile once you get to know it but I have nearly always used it for PDF output and then sent those files to the printer rather than printing direct from publisher. It also means you can check your output before wasting ink

If by the sounds of it you have two printers set up correctly then life could be as simple as dragging the PDF file to the relevant printer icon / print que. and letting it do the rest but you need to have the defaults for the printers set up correctly!

[Anonymous]

That's interesting, DG - thanks for the tip! It's probably the way to go. Publishing direct to printers seems to be more trouble than it's worth.

We always publish to PDFs anyway - and thereby hangs another tale of woe.

Since you have the same setup as us, I wonder if you've experienced any permissions problems with PDFs published in Archicad. We've been plagued with this since switching to release 18 and upgrading to Yosemite.

[DGSketcher]

Not sure what you are referring to with permissions?

If you mean PDF file passwords then I never use them as it simplifies things for those who need to read them. Never had much problem other than files which seem to occasionally become unreadable when emailed, but there is no pattern to it.

[Anonymous]

If you don't know what I mean by permissions, then you obviously don't have the problem!

What happens is this: if we publish a PDF through Archicad, the resulting file cannot be attached to an email (causes Outlook to hang), overwritten (causes a 'fail' in Publisher), or deleted ('You do not have permission to delete this file') until after a reboot.

For some reason, none of this happens if we publish to our desktops, rather than to our network - which might suggest the problem lies in our network, though we never had this before Release 18, and don't experience it with any other programs.

Nor does this problem occur if we print a file as a PDF.

Our IT consultant is mystified. Graphisoft admitted a fault and said they would issue a patch round about September last year. We're still waiting.

[DGSketcher]

I don't use teamwork (one-man-band) or an internal network and I'm using Apple Mail. As I say I don't have any problems. The one thing "Network" related, is that despite giving AC18 firewall permissions in the Apple Security setting I am still asked every time whether I want to allow AC to connect to the internet. Just a thought that it may be impacting internal permissions, probably not.