Design Review – 2010 Hot Fix 1

7/1/2009

Volker, Thank You! 

For all those that may not have experienced the PDF output from DR 2010, I’d like to say “It sucks”, but that wouldn’t be polite.  True, but not polite.

Instead I’ll just say “Thank You Volker! and DR people”.  Autodesk released a Hot Fix June 19th, 2009.  I must say that Volker’s team is very dedicated to fixing problems, and reviewed a few of my issues with me.

I have tried to adopt the Autodesk DWF idea.  A couple of years back at AU, a British Autodesk fellow introduced me to Buzzsaw. (I apologize as I cannot remember his name).  I saw the publishing possibilities in both and decided to push forward, but Buzzsaw is just not cost effective down here in the trenches, so I had to stop working the angles on it.  I have however stayed fixed on DWF. 

I use it as a point of reference for a final product.  Once the job is completed, I use DR to review, markup new revisions, or to distribute.  It serves as a central publishing point as well, whether hard copy, direct email, or PDF.

Since most of my clients use PDF, and are still not on the DWF band wagon, PDF is what I most often publish.  However, since 2010, I have been pulling my hair out, and even considered going to PDF for my publishing platform.

Thank God for the fix.  Now if I can just get something to help AutoCAD get the lead out of it’s direct PDF output.

You can read Volker’s article and community comments here.

You can download the Hotfix and (very important) the instructions here.

Civil 3D – Multi-sheet Publishing

Since multisheet publishing to dwf came out, and subsequently the recent Design Review versions, I have been a big fan of multi-sheet DWF Publishing, so much so that I put links to Design Review in my emails, and promote it at every opportunity.  I even became a Beta tester for Joseph Volker’s team (hush hush and all that).

The problem I usually face is not necessarily with Design Review, but is in the AutoCAD Drivers for dwf plotting, and how that relates to Multi-sheet.  I just recently installed a service Pack, and Publish in Background defaulted again. 

As many of you are aware, many of you are not.  If you try multi-sheet publishing and if crashes, even if it is not DWF, try killing the background publishing. 

There have been many write-ups on this, and it certainly applies to my setup.  However since I’m at work on Sunday, and it just crashed me AGAIN, I thought I’d remind the new guys.