We recently had a question from a customer whereby he asked how to print multiple file to PDF.

The following process will work if you are printing from the Layouts (but could be used for Model space printing as well)

The AutoCAD command that you would use is Publish. You can access the tool via the Application button as shown below.

The publish dialogue box will appear and then set your printer to the PDF option. You can also set it to a physical printer but for this example we’ll use PDF.

Now you can set various options by clicking on the Publish option button. The option I set was to deselect the Mutli-sheet file as the client wanted a separate PDF file for each print.

Now that all the settings are set you can add your drawings by selecting the + button and browsing to the drawing files you want to print. It will then list the Model space and layouts of each drawing.

In this example I removed the Model spaces of each drawing as I did not want them to be printed – only the Layouts. You would select the view and click the ‘–‘ button to remove it from the list. Once this is done you can click Publish.

It will then print and produce each PDF based on the setting on each Layout. It will also print using the ‘foreground’ processes as the ‘Publish in Background’ option was not ticked. This ‘Publish in Background’ option is found on the bottom left hand side of the dialogue box. Background printing / publishing is when you have many prints to do and you also need to work as well. When you click print the processing of the prints are done in the background and you can carry on working.