Ms windows & Autodesk?

I have written a lisp that gets around plotting issues with acad 2005.
Basically it batch plots the same way as in acad 2004 which is way easier-
for our office.
What it asks for are the tabs to be plotted via a dialog box the prints them
using a pc.3 file.
However for some reason orientation seems to screw up - I get portrait
instead of landscape and vice versa.
But not everyone in our office has this problem. Sometimes A4 drawings are
printed instead of A3. Is it that perhaps when a ms application document is
printed then acad settings mess up - though I can't as yet confirm this?
Why aren't the drawings printed as per the page set for each drawing.
Does anyone know what causes the page set up to change?
thanks Russ

 

yep and its a one of Autodesks bigger disasters, hence why I have made my
own batch plot program.

 

You mean besides a bunch of bugs that have never been resolved? Basically
AutoCAD is half Windows printing and half who knows what but probably
carried over from the unix days. Have you ever noticed that if you pick a
system printer in AutoCAD and use the Custom Properties to say change the
resolution or custom page size that it then prompts you to create a
temporary pc3 file. Well the rest of the Windows world makes these changes
directly to a printer handle which is separate from the default printer
settings. And then when it prints it uses these application specific
settings. The problem is that Autodesk doesn't do this and worse yet it
doesn't check for the current settings of a Windows printer driver so if you
make a change to a system printer driver once AutoCAD has plotted once it
won't see it until you close down and restart AutoCAD.

The solution is to create a pc3 file which is encrypeted with about 3 levels
for some strange reason and Autodesk has never released an API for it or
even a simple command line version of it that one could use.

And to top it off it doesn't always properly recognize that printers could
actually print in landscape instead of portait mode. Try taking a Windows
system printer and set it's defaults in Windows to be Landscape and Letter
size. Then start AutoCAD and pick that system printer and you will likely
see that the Letter size still thinks it's in portrait while the others
think they are in landscape or vice versa.

So what could happen is that someone changes the orientation on printer
driver after it's been used in AutoCAD and this messes it up. This can
usually be solved by using a pc3 file but you have to setup paper sizes in
both landscape and portrait mode and then always print from portrait in
AutoCAD. That's they the DWF pc3 files now has all pages size defined as
both 11x17 and 17x11.

Breaks over. Hope this helps. If you have some spare time check out our
AcroPlot software which is batch plotting to PDF and let me know what you
think. It's been a couple years of beating my head against the wall and
we're still finding weird printing bugs like an image that won't print at
1:2 or 1:4 scale but works at 1:2.001 or 1.999 in 2002. Fixed in 2004
though.

--
Rodney McManamy
President
CADzation
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McHenry, IL 60050
www.cadzation.com
Providing Industrial Strength
PDF & DWF Solutions to the
Global CAD Marketplace.

 

Using 2005 and the publish command works like a godsend....