Printing many drawings in one time

use the SW task scheduler. start, programs, solidworks 2004, solidworks

snipped-for-privacy@012.net.il (Felix) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

Use the Task Scheduler. It works great for this. I've been using it to print out quite a few drawings at one time and it makes it so much easier and quicker than opening each one seperately.

Richard

Another tip to automatically print all draings for an assembly:

Store all of your released drawings as .prn or .hp2 or .plt files by printing each drawing to a file.

Next create a batch file for each drawing that will automatically print that drawing AND the drawing for each component if the drawing is of an assembly.

For example, say you have a drawing of assembly XYZ. XYZ includes components X, Y, and Z. So, you should first create XYZ.prn, X.prn, Y.prn, and Z.prn. Your batch file(s) should look something like this:

XYZ.bat: COPY "C:\DRAWINGS\XYZ.prn" LPT1 CALL "C:\BATCH\X.bat" CALL "C:\BATCH\Y.bat" CALL "C:\BATCH\Z.bat"

X.bat: COPY "C:\DRAWINGS\X.prn" LPT1

Y.bat: COPY "C:\DRAWINGS\Y.prn" LPT1

Z.bat: COPY "C:\DRAWINGS\Z.prn" LPT1

(if your printer is a network printer, relplace LPT1 with \\server_name\printer_name)

Now, if you want to print all drawings for assembly XYZ, all you need to do is run XYZ.bat and all will be printed automatically. When changes are made to an assembly, you must make sure the batch file is kept up to date, mostly this just involves the batch files for assemblies to ensure it calls all the right components. It should be possible to create a macro that does all of this automatically from SWX, but I have never tried it.

I just was playing around with the solidworks viewer and it seems that you can use it to print from the command line. Here's how:

path to solidworks\Viewer\swviewer /p "name of file to print"

Anders