Publishing and Printing with AutoCAD - Seventh 7

CHAPTER 32: SET OF PLANS

The tool called “Set of plans” consists of a mechanism to integrate, and organize, in a single control file, the list of presentations of one or several drawing files to create, precisely, a set of plans that can be printed or transmitted (via the Internet) as a single entity. Said list can be logically organized into subsets and the tool itself offers methods so that its administration (modifications, updates, etc.) is very simple.
Strictly speaking, this tool should have been exposed in the section dedicated to the organization of drawings. However, its creation depends on the presentations presented in the 29 chapter and its main function is associated with the printing (and transmission) of the planes that derive from them. Therefore, your study at this point is more productive, because once we have studied the process of tracing, we can make it simpler if, to generate all the plans of a project, we use this tool.
The Sheet Set Manager is a tool panel that allows you to generate and modify the list of layouts that make up the sheet set. This list is saved in a “.DST” type file. Obviously, we can create various sets of plans, open them, modify them, etc., always through the same tool panel.
To create a set of plans, we use an assistant that is activated with the New menu- Plane set. Within the wizard we can choose to use a template or create the whole set, importing the desired presentations.

As explained before, the alternative is to create a set of plans based on existing presentations, creating a custom subset structure. For that, the wizard allows creating a list of drawing files, detecting the presentations contained in them.

Once the set of plans has been created, its administration is carried out through a panel of tools, whose default view is the list of plans. Said panel includes a toolbar whose main objective is the publication of the plans. That is, its printing through a printer or plotter (plotter), or its publication to be transmitted as a .DWF file, an issue that was the subject of the 31 chapter.
The Plan Set Manager can also be opened with a ribbon button. Once active, it allows us to open or create sets, organize them, publish them, transmit them, and so on. It even gives us access to any of the presentations in the list with a double click, which opens the corresponding drawing file. So it also becomes an agile way to work with the files that intervene in the project.

If we add a new plane with the contextual menu shown above, we are actually creating a presentation in a new, empty drawing. When creating it, we can indicate its name and its properties. This presentation will be added to the list, from which we can double-click it to open as a new Autocad file. Which means that this tool, from the side of the presentations, is also a method to manage the files and drawings of Autocad, so it can become your working guide for the development of projects. Or, simply, it may be the method by which you combine the presentations made in various drawing files with the idea of ​​giving order to the printing of plans. That depends on the emphasis you want to give to this tool.