Autodesk Vault is a great tool for managing your files and controlling how information is passed around the office to be reviewed and accepted to be released to manufacturing.

For designers, having the CAD software allows us to see all information, but when it comes to users downstream not having the native CAD software might raise issues.

This is where creating PDF’s is extremely useful. PDF has long been the standard for enabling users to access copies of files that have been generated by design software.

Without an additional app that has been developed, the creation of PDF’ is very manual. For example, if you have thirty 2D drawing files and you want to create a PDF of all of them, you will need to open and print export each drawing individually to PDF. This can take an inordinate amount of time.

So how can Autodesk Vault assist with automating this process os you do not find that you are spending hours and hours trying to create PDF’s when you have other more pressing matters to attend to.

The Autodesk Vault client installs with the Vault Job Processor. This software grabs jobs that would normally take a lot of time doing manually and processes them either when an event has been triggered or when you have initiated the process manually.

In most scenarios you would like to have the PDF be created when you change the lifecycle state to Released. This is done by selecting the action of creating a PDF on the state change as in the below image.

You can also manually trigger the process in the Vault client by right clicking on IDW or DWG and selecting Create – PDF.

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