Print and plot - Communicate Your Design Intent

- [Instructor] Once again, we're staying in our design intent .dwg file, and you can see there that we've got our Annotative Scaling working in our viewport in our ISO A3-Landscape tab. We've got our dimensions table in the other viewport and it's all sitting nicely in our Title Block. So, we're now in a position where we can utilize our page setup, that we set up previously, to plot our drawing. Now I'm not going to bore you by just sitting there waiting for a PDF to actually plot on the computer. I just want to show you the work flow and the process to do this. Now, the reason I want to do this is I want to show you the output tab on the ribbon here, like so. Because what we can do is we can go here to plot, we can also batch plot if we want to, we can preview our plot, we can go into our page setup manager and so on. We can also override existing page setups to export to DWF and PDF as well and I just want to go through these with you. But we've already got a page setup in place, so if I click on plot now, in the output tab on the ribbon it'll say Oh you've got multiple drawings or layouts open, I have, I've got ISO A3-Landscape, ISO A3-Details. Now ISO A3-Details is empty, it's just a Title Block at the moment, so I'm going to continue to plot to a single sheet in this case. Notice it adopts the page setup we set up, the ISO A3-Landscape PDF. Now I'm not going to plot but what I am going to do is preview, so I click on preview and that's what I'm going to get. So I'm now in the preview of the plot, you'll notice the viewports don't plot because we set them not to in the layer properties manager, but we've got our nice little objects, our dimensions and our dimensions table. So we've got a nice, simple, AutoCAD drawing and you can see there that if I now hit the plot button, that'll go out to a PDF and actually look like that. That's how quick and easy it is, and I can now just right-click and exit the preview and it'll take me back to the dialogue box if I need to change any settings. I'm going to click on cancel in this case. Now, it prompted you about batch plotting, if I batch plot, what it'll do is it will open up the Publish dialogue box and I can batch plot any number of layout tabs and also the model tab and save those settings, a bit like a page setup that we set up previously. Now I'm not going to go into this in any detail, but you can see that all of it can be set up any which way you want, you hit the publish button and off it goes and it publishes all of the different tabs you might have in your DWG file, instead of doing them one by one, and you can set all the settings in here and you can save all of those settings as what is called a sheet list file. So if I click on Save Here, it'll save it as a DSD file. Now, what you may find is when you try to do this, it may say to you hang on a minute, one or more of the drawings have unsaved changes. Just close that and cancel your Publish and you'll notice do you want to save the current list of sheets, no I don't but here, see the little asterisk on the File Tab, that's telling you that you haven't saved the drawing recently, that asterisk means that there's changes to the drawing that haven't been saved. So just make sure that you save the changes and then go back to batch plot, set everything up, save your DSD file and then those properties are set whenever you need to do a batch plot again. So I'll click on cancel like so, do I want to save that list of sheets? No I don't. Now the other thing you can do is you can export to DWF and PDF, and what I like about this is if I was going to export out to said DWF, it opens up a dialogue box, I can save the documents wherever I want them to go, but I can override any page setup settings here, you'll notice, and save it out as a DWF. I can also do that to a PDF, like so, same dialogue box but it's going out to a PDF with PDF settings, there's the preset in the page setup but I can override that if I want to. So you have this export panel which allows you to override your existing page setup settings as well. So when you're plotting your drawing, there's lots of different ways and tools to allow you to communicate that design intent as well, so you can use your page setup, how you've set it up and how you want it to plot and you can preview that and you can hit the plot button. You can publish by using batch plot and publish as many layout tabs, even the model tab if you wish. And then if you need to override it, go to the export panel in the output tab in the ribbon. So, we've got to a point now with this Learning AutoCAD course, where you've got to a point where you are communicating your design intent from a very simple AutoCAD drawing.