command line printing

I know its possible to run DWG Trueview from a command line and select a drawing to view. But can I take it a step further and tell Trueview to open and print the drawing rather than view it. Are there switches or variables I can enter to select everything I need to be able to print, without viewing the drawing? My customers want to be able to print multiple job order information in an accounting system, and along with the jobs info, print the drawings attached to those jobs, in batch mode (not one at a time). I basically want to pass the drawing and printer name to trueview, and print the drawing. The less interaction the customer has with trueview, the better. Any help will be appreciated. Scott

This would have to be a job for the .Net API...I know there is no LISP interaction and I did not see any VBA...I am not all that familiar with the DWG True View API...This has to be programmed and not just entered at the command line...Check the .Net Programming forum and ask there...They may be able to help you...

Hi

Have you looked at implementing Page Setups and using the Publish command within DWG Trueview...

Have a good one, Mike

I have been looking at how I can use DWG True View 2009 to do the batch plotting in my drawing office. Just as with AutoCAD if you start Dwg TrueView 2009 using a DOS batch file with the line:

call "C:\Program Files\Dwg TrueView 2009\dwgviewr.exe" "test.dwg" /b "plota4_model.scr"

with the switch /b added as shown above and then specify a script file which contains the typical responses to AutoCAD's _PLOT command (notice I used "_Plot", not "-plot") then you can get the program to open a drawing then plot it.

That's where I am up to so far. Now how do I get a heap of drawings to open up in Dwg TrueView one at a time and plot them out? Note that you have to have the right page setup with default plotter and plot style saved otherwise the script will stop. It would also be nice if the script worked out whether the drawing was in paperspace or modelspace so that it would use the correct responses.

Robert Smeallie
Australia

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Originally Posted by robert_smeallie

Now how do I get a heap of drawings to open up in Dwg TrueView one at a time and plot them out?

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Use the ._PUBLISH command.

I looked at the Publish feature - you need to have the correct plotter named in the Page Setup for each drawing for it to send plots to the printer, otherwise you have to open up each drawing and change the settings which defeats the whole purpose of batch plotting. Unfortunately the guys in this office all use different printers/plotters depending on who and where they are, so there's no guarantee that the printer that I want to use for the batch plot will be the one specified in the drawing's Page Setup.

I've been looking at using a VB application to mimic what AutoCAD does to plot a drawing. That is, asks you for the drawings you want to plot, the Page Size and Orientation, what to plot (Extents, Layout, Window, etc) and what plotter to use. Based on your answers, it creates a script file which you can then use to open each drawing one by one and send the _Plot command to DWG TrueView to plot it as per my previous comment. Has anyone else gone down this path yet?

Robert Smeallie

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Originally Posted by robert_smeallie

I looked at the Publish feature - you need to have the correct plotter named in the Page Setup for each drawing for it to send plots to the printer, otherwise you have to open up each drawing and change the settings

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No you don't. You can import a named page setup to some or all sheets inside the ._Publish command.

I can see what you mean now - I was able to create a drawing in AutoCAD and set up the various page setups - A3, A4, Modelspace, Layout Space for our default printer then save a copy of the drawing in DWG TrueView's support folder and then "Import" the drawing complete withthe various Page Setups which I then applied to each of the drawings to be printed out. When it came to the acid test it still bombed out because the drawings themselves had problems. They had been created in BRICSCAD which, although it might claim to have DWG support, still broke both AutoCAD and DWG TrueView when they tried to do a batch plot of the drawings (about 14 all up) - Drawing Files Corrupted messages and a cancellation of the batch plot.

As it stands DWG TrueView's still too dumb to be able to determine whether the drawing was in Model Space or Paper Space since it doesn't support any kind of LISP or VB, so OK for single drawing plots but for batch plotting hundreds of drawings I'll wait till Multi-Batch or some VBA guru can come up with the sort of applet I outlined in my last post to do the "number crunching" and leave DWG TrueView to be the dumb print driver hanging off the end.

Thanks for your comments.
Robert Smeallie

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Originally Posted by robert_smeallie

As it stands DWG TrueView's still too dumb to be able to determine whether the drawing was in Model Space or Paper Space

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Why do you need to determine this? How would using AutoCAD be any different?

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Originally Posted by robert_smeallie

so OK for single drawing plots but for batch plotting hundreds of drawings I'll wait...

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We use PUBLISH to print sets of 100 or more all the time with no problems. I guess if your drawings are of unknown origin, there could be issues as you mentioned above.

Good luck whichever route you choose.

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Originally Posted by robert_smeallie

As it stands DWG TrueView's still too dumb to be able to determine whether the drawing was in Model Space or Paper Space...

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Robert,
I have to agree with R.K. I don't think you understand Publish very well. You can load up hundreds of drawings in the Publish dialog, adding only layouts if that is the option you've selected. See the lower right area of the dialog. If you think there are problems about model space vs. "paper space" (let's call it what it is, layouts) then you probably left the Include Model option checked.

Once all the sheets are loaded in the dialog, you can select them all, hit the drop-down arrow on the page setups, and Import from any drawing or template.

That's about as "batch print" as you can get.

Aside from corrupt drawings, which is a separate issue.