Publishing and Printing with AutoCAD - Seventh 7

30.4 Printing

The Print menu works in the same way as in any other Windows program: it opens the dialog box to print, which in this case is very similar to the Configure page, so if we had already used this option, we can simply press OK to that the impression has effect. The same dialog box is opened with the Trace button in the section of the same name on the Output tab.

Consider that Autocad is able to do the job of drawing plans at the same time that it allows you to continue with your drawing work. For the layout to be done in this way, we must indicate it in the Options dialog box, in the Trace and Publication tab, where, simply, we must activate the corresponding box. Thus, during printing, we will see an animated icon in the Windows taskbar and a notification when the printing finishes.

To conclude this section, it must be added that all this impressive flexibility to prepare the layout of Autocad drawings eliminates any restriction in this regard. But if it is not used with method, the combination of presentations, configurations of plotters or printers, paper configurations and layout styles can turn this process into a chaotic element.

To avoid this, we suggest the following:

1) Make as many presentations as plans will emerge from your model. This is easier than modifying a presentation several times to generate different plans.

2) Make sure that only one page configuration (size, orientation, etc.) always corresponds to each presentation. If you need to modify this configuration, try to save, with a sufficiently descriptive name, the previous configuration.

3) As already studied, we can apply "drawing styles" by objects or by layers. Use one of these methods if the color and line thickness of your drawing is different from what you want in print. What you should not do is mix these methods. That is, follow only one of the two criteria for assigning styles, not both, and as long as it is essential that the colors of the drawing in the model space must necessarily vary from those you want to print.

30.5 PDF Print

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is a document format that has become very popular due to its compatibility with different platforms. Its use on the Internet is very widespread, because to view and print PDF documents, the famous Adobe Acrobat Reader is usually downloaded for free and installed on each computer.
Drawings in Autocad can be printed electronically in PDF using what was seen in the previous section, but using the “DWG to PDF.pc3” plotter from the list of available plotters. The rest of the process is the same, although we can take advantage here to review everything. The end result will then be a PDF file that we can view with Acrobat Reader.