Creating an E-Transmit Package and Printing a PDF in AutoCAD

Now that we have finished our floor plan and added all of the appropriate annotation, we can see how this project looks in our A201 sheet file. In this video, we are going to e-transmit, which creates a zipped package of all reference data, and create a printed PDF.

This printed PDF will be the final submission for this CAD101 Introduction to AutoCAD course. Now let's open up our CAD101 A201 sheet file, and let's see how the xref has been updated. I'll go File, Open.

I'll find cad101a201.dwg. I'll hit Open. We could compare this. I'm going to close because we can see that our floor plan has appropriately updated.

And now we can start by creating our e-transmit. If I go to the File drop-down, you will see that there is an e-transmit option. If I choose e-transmit, we can see that our current drawing is the selected file, and that there are a few things included in this current drawing that will be bound together and created into a zipped folder.

These files could then be emailed or uploaded or sent to a colleague, and they could open the drawing and see all references and the original drawing, and that way there's nothing lost in a data transfer. If you sent the A201 file by itself to a colleague, they would not know where the external references are saved, and the drawing would actually be mainly blank. An e-transmit protects all of your drawings and puts them all into one package so that you could send it to a colleague or an external source.

These are the exact files we need, so I can hit OK, and I'll replace the word standard with my initials, and please replace it with your initials. I'll hit Save. The e-transmit is not the final for this course.

A PDF submission is instead. In order to create a PDF, we need to print it or, in this case, plot. I can go File, Plot, which is an old-school word for print, but historically plotters have been used because they printed large-scale architectural drawings.

So I'll go Plot. Here we can see the plot window open. Now, you'll notice a lot of my settings say none.

Your settings might say something different, but we will start by assigning these one at a time. For print or plotter, we want to create a PDF, so we can go to DWG to PDF. This is an internal print driver that comes with AutoCAD, and it creates PDFs from our DWGs.

It's important that you choose this option, or else you might not see the paper size we are about to use. Speaking of paper size, if I hit the drop-down after choosing DWG to PDF, you will see that there are a lot of options. These options might do different things depending on what real-world printer you are printing to, but because this is a PDF, we could simply choose an 8.5 × 11 that includes full bleed.

That means that any piece of geometry on our drawing will be printed to the PDF. So I will choose ANSI full bleed A 8.5 × 11. You'll notice that creates a vertical preview here, but under drawing orientation, we can simply choose landscape.

When we see plot area, it says what to plot. There are four options, display, extents, limits, and window. In this case, display and extents are fairly similar, but I always want to choose a window in this situation.

The window will allow me to choose exactly the geometry that I would like to print. I'll zoom out once, and I'll choose the bottom endpoint here to the top endpoint here. These small tick marks have been included in the title block file exactly for this purpose.

You'll see that plot offset has an offset of zero and zero, and you would really have to know your paper size in order to know an offset, but in this case, we can simply center the plot. One of the final options we need to look at is plot scale. This plot scale says fit to paper, and that is not what I would like.

We can see that we have chosen quarter inch equals a foot for the scale of this drawing, so I need to uncheck this and choose quarter inch equals a foot. This is because we are plotting from model space and not paper space. Remember, we will print from paper space in future courses.

If I hit preview at this time with no table tile assigned, you will notice that our drawing is in color to match our layers. I'll hit escape to go back. The plot style table, or the color table file, or pen assignments as they're called here in parentheses, reference how AutoCAD understands pens and colors as line weights and transparency, or in AutoCAD's terms, screening.

If I choose the drop down below, we can see that there are many color table files that are automatically included with AutoCAD, and one that comes with our course. That is the VDCI color table file, but in some cases, it might be missing for you. In this case, I want to show you a trick to add a color table file directly into the Autodesk folder, where it will always be found by your drawings.

In this case, I'm going to type in styles manager, and you'll see the suggestion. As soon as I hit ENTER, you'll see that a file explorer window has opened somewhere on your computer. Hopefully, it opened right in front of AutoCAD so you could see it.

This is where the color table files and the style table files are found for all AutoCAD settings for your version of AutoCAD. If you have used a different version in the past, you might not see your user created color table files in this folder. Now, I'm going to make a new file explorer window and move it to the side.

Go to our local disk C and file downloads, and remember, here is our VDCI color table file. I can drag it into here, hold control to copy, and now it is in this location and in this location. So, no matter what, I should see this color table file when I make new drawings.

I can close both of these windows, and now let's go back to file plot, make sure we choose our VDCI color table file, and it will ask me if I want to assign this plot style to all layouts. This includes our 8.5 × 11 layout and our 11 × 17 layout, so I'll choose yes for now, and now when I hit preview, we will see that this prints in black and white and a lighter gray color for that fill. I will hit escape to go back to my plot window, and then I'll choose okay to create my PDF.

From here, please browse back to your CAD101 file downloads folder, and here is where we want to save our PDF. In this case, I'll replace the word model, which was our drawing space, that's where it got that, with my initials. Please replace this with your initials, so it should read CAD101 A201 dash your initials.

I'll hit save. As it plots, it will give me a notification, and this notification says no errors or warnings found, and this tells me that my PDF printed correctly. Additionally, if you have a PDF reader on your computer, it might automatically open the PDF.

You will see that our PDF also includes AutoCAD layers, which you might be able to view in your PDF reader, and this is the file that you should upload for your final assignment in Introduction to AutoCAD. I hope that you've enjoyed this course, and I hope to see you continue the CAD series at VDCI, Virtual Design and Construction Institute.