If You Want to Experiment...

If You Want to Experiment

This chapter has shown you a variety of AutoCAD features that are intended to help improve the workflow on any project you might encounter. Perhaps one of the more important features is the ability to publish to a DWF file format. By using DWF, you can easily exchange drawings with project members , clients , and others who need to view your drawings.

But before others can view the DWF files you create, they need a copy of the Autodesk DWF Viewer. You can obtain a free copy by downloading it from the Autodesk website.

Go to www.autodesk.com and select your country from the site selection page. In the Autodesk home page, browse to the Products page, look for the Autodesk DWF Viewer page, and then download the viewer. The actual download file is called ExpressViewSetup.exe and is approximately 3MB in size . Autodesk grants free use and distribution of the viewer, so you can include copies along with your DWF files.

Chapter 22: Keeping a Project Organized with Sheet Sets

Overview

It's rare to have a drawing project fit on one sheet. Most CAD projects require multiple sheets, sometimes numbering in the hundreds. With multiple sheets in a project, you often spend a fair amount of time checking cross-references between the drawings and making sure that sheet titles and other information are correct.

Even the smallest project requires some coordination of cross-references between drawings in a set and checking for consistency across sheets. For example, a floor plan of a house will have call- out symbols that will direct you to a sheet with building elevations , construction details, or door and window schedules. As a CAD user , you eventually spend a lot of time just making sure that you have your set of drawings in the proper order and labeled correctly. Checking a set of drawings for continuity and correctness is a time-consuming job, and errors can easily creep in.

ACAD only To help make your sheet coordination efforts easier, AutoCAD 2005 offers the Sheet Set Manager. (If you are an LT user, you may be interested in the information presented here, but the Sheet Set Manager is not available in AutoCAD 2005 LT.)

Understanding Sheet Sets

The Sheet Set Manager is a tool that keeps track of all the drawings in a project. It also helps maintain the integrity of cross-references between sheets in a set of drawings by automatically updating sheet numbers throughout a set as sheets are added or moved. The Sheet Set Manager won't replace a careful check of a set of drawings before they are released for consumption, but it will reduce the amount of time you spend on coordinating and checking a set of drawings.

Sheet sets and the Sheet Set Manager can be a bit difficult to understand clearly, so in this section you can take a moment to get a better idea of what sheet sets are all about.

Organizing by Reference Files and Sheet Files

To better understand how sheet sets work, it helps to consider the methods used to organize Auto- CAD files. One common method for organizing files is to separate drawings into two categories: reference files and sheet files. You can think of reference files as the data sources. These are the drawing files that contain the core drawing geometry of a project. For example, they might be the floor plan drawings that contain the paving, finish, ceiling, and power information, all drawn in Model Space.

Sheet files are files that represent the actual printed sheets or pages in the drawing set. Sheet files include title block information as well as the different views of the reference files needed for the sheet. View titles and scale information are also included.

You use one layout tab in the sheet file for each physical sheet that eventually gets printed. The reference files are included as Xrefs in the sheet files with the appropriate views and layers set up for that sheet.

For example, you might have one sheet file called A1 Floor Plan.dwg that has a title block in its layout tab. That layout tab will have a viewport containing a view of an Xref floor plan file. Another sheet file called A2 Enlarged Plan.dwg might contain the same Xref but with a layout tab including multiple viewports to show a more detailed set of views of the plan.

The Sheet Set Manager can take this reference/sheet system of file organization and automate it. Without the Sheet Set Manager, a user would have to create the sheet file, import the reference file, and then add a title block, viewport, and labels to produce a finished sheet. The Sheet Set Manager automates many of the fussy details of creating and maintaining the sheet files.

Note

The example given here illustrates one way that sheet sets can be used. You don't have to organize your drawings in this way to take advantage of sheet sets. The key point to remember is that the sheet sets focus on drawing layouts as the equivalent to drawing sheets. As long as you set up drawings to use layouts for your final output, you can use sheet sets successfully.

Managing Your Files with Sheet Sets

Sheet sets also serve as a way to gain an overview of your drawing set in a way similar to the table of contents of a book. When you use the Sheet Set Manager, you can view a list of all the drawings in your project and quickly find and open the drawing you need to work on.

You can think of the Sheet Set Manager as a database that contains information about the drawings in the set. It uses a file with the .dst filename extension to store this information. Like a database, this file is updated automatically whenever you make changes to the sheet set. It doesn't wait for you to manually save the sheet set data. In fact, you won't see a File Save option in the Sheet Set Manager.

The Sheet Set Manager has the ability to make changes to multiple drawing files whenever there is a change that affects the entire set. For example, if there is a change in the project information in the title block, you can update all the title blocks in the set by making a single change in the Sheet Set Manager. The Sheet Set Manager can keep track of title block data such as submission dates, drawing titles, people who have worked on the individual drawings, and other title-block- related information.

Finally, the Sheet Set Manager can help simplify the printing of whole sets of drawings by automatically setting up AutoCAD's Publish feature. It can help automate your archiving tasks and help collect all the necessary files to send your set to a different location for editing.