An Easy Way to Publish Drawings from Different Folders

How do you publish drawings from different folders? Do you navigate to each folder from the publish dialog box for selecting files? That sounds really painful. Don’t worry; a simple drag and drop trick can ease your pain.

I will show you the method to accomplish this with the help of a sample folder structure. The following image shows a sample root folder with 5 different project folders.

Each folder contains different drawing files. For publishing all the drawings in a single stretch, follow the steps as given below.

• Click on the root folder (‘Sample’ in this case) and hit the search button on the toolbar.
• Type *.dwg to list all the drawings under the root folder and subfolders.

• Invoke the publish dialog box inside AutoCAD.
• Press Ctrl+A to select all files or use Ctrl/Shift + Left Mouse Click to select only desired files in the explorer search window.
• Now drag and drop the selected files to the publish dialog box. That’s it! You are done with selecting multiple files from multiple folders.

Try that and you will come to know that it is as simple as any other AutoCAD drag & drop operations.

A Quick Tip on Publishing Drawings into Individual PDF Files

Recently our designers came across a requirement of publishing drawings into individual PDF files. For those who don’t know, here is the main setting you have to remember while publishing PDF files.

1. Click on ‘Publish Options’ button inside the Publish dialog box.
2. Inside the Publish Options window, select type as ‘Single-sheet file’ instead of ‘Multi-sheet file’ in the ‘General DWF/PDF options’ as shown in the image below.

Rest of the publish settings shall be same as publishing multiple PDF files. This tip might be familiar to most of you. Well, I have another tip for you to handle post publish PDF file names using windows command prompt. Using REN command with a combination of wildcard characters, you can easily rename the PDF files to standard names. For example, you would like to rename ‘Drawing_xxx-Model.pdf’ file to ‘Drawing_xxx.pdf’ format where xxx stands for unique characters. Here is the command for the above scenario.

REN *_???-Model.pdf *_???.pdf

As you can see in the above image, the file names have been modified using a single command line. The wildcard combination may vary from case to case. Have a look at windows commands and command prompt if you have not yet experimented with it. It will definitely help you to handle your day-to-day tasks easily and comfortably.