ABS Exchange

Topic: CAD Tip to use eTransmit for drawing distribution outside the office or project archiving, in replacement of the binding and zipping process.

ETRANSMIT

Use eTransmit to prepare both drawing packages going outside the office, and design milestone project archives.

For the related but separate purposes of sending drawings outside the office and creating design milestone archives, we have traditionally used a two-step process -- 1) 'binding' xrefs to the host drawings, and 2) zipping the host drawings into archive packages for transmittal or storage.

There are some drawbacks to the traditional approach:

• Copies of common xrefs are stored in each of the host drawings requiring them, resulting in unnecessary duplication and large file sizes.
• Each host drawing must be processed manually, one at a time.
• 'Zipping' is a separate process, potentially time-consuming and not without pitfalls, which must be done outside of AutoCAD.
• Drawings, once xrefs are bound, require additional work to remove bound entities if they are ever required as backups or 'rollbacks' for the current working drawings.

While the traditional process is inefficient but still workable for a 'normal' project, we have seen a few projects recently using Autodesk Architectural Desktop that have literally dozens and dozens of interrelated xrefs, where binding all of the required xrefs to each of the host drawings one at a time would be unmanageably time-consuming.

eTransmit does it all for as many drawings as desired in a one-step process, includes only one copy of commonly used reference files so is more efficient than binding drawing-by-drawing, and perhaps best of all 'relativizes' the xref paths in the host drawings so that xref's resolve no matter where they are unpacked, whether outside the office or years down the road when unarchived.


Select 'eTransmit' from the file menu to get started, click the 'Add File...' button to add as many drawings as desired to the archive or transmittal package. Click on the 'Transmittal Setups...' button to access the default settings dialogue:

The settings shown above generally work well; you may wish to click the 'Set default plotter to 'none'' and 'Include fonts' options for drawings transmitted outside the office. DO NOT check the 'Bind external references' box as this likely will increase the size of the archive manyfold, due to duplication of common backgrounds. If desired, transmittal settings may be named and saved for future reference.

Labels: CAD Tips