Simplifying assembly printing

[jludwig]

I was curious if there exists some way to print out all the drawings within an assembly without having to open up each individual part's drawing file and manually hitting print. Some sort of Batch code that would iterate through the Model tree, find all existing DWG's and send them off as a print job. Anyone have any ideas?

This thread is inactive and closed by the PTC Community Management Team. If you would like to provide a reply and re-open this thread, please notify the moderator and reference the thread. You may also use "Start a topic" button to ask a new question. Please be sure to include what version of the PTC product you are using so another community member knowledgeable about your version may be able to assist.

[LEONIDGUREVICH]

Hi,

You can use the "Creo Distributed Batch" programm

Regards

[jthakor]

Hi,

If you dont want to go in batch programming then follow below method :

• Create Tiff image in single directory for all drawings
• to create tiff image use creo mapkey (may be useful step)
• select all tiff images from folder and take print out.

May be this is useful..

Thanks,

Jitu

[dgschaefer]

This requires some set up and ongoing maintenance, but we create "overlay" drawings for the full assy and any sub assys.

1. We create a new drawing with the same name as the assy and the suffix _OVERLAY
2. We use the "Overlay" function from the Insert section of the layout tab to add overlays of each drawing related to that assy, starting with the assy drawing.
   1. Create a blank sheet, no format
   2. Select "Overlay"
   3. Select "add Overlay"
   4. Select "Place Sheet"
   5. Select the drawing to overlay, select OK
   6. Select the sheet if needed (We put all sheet in the overlay, so for multi-sheet drawings each sheet has to be added.)
3. Repeat for all drawings related to that assy.

It takes a little time to set up and if new drawings are made, the overlay needs to be updated, but it's a very handy tool.

This allows for a couple of things.

1. You can print all drawings in the assy by printing the overlay
2. You can backup an assy, all parts and all drawings by backing up the overlay.

We also found that if you do an overlay of each sub assy and then do an overlay of the main assy but just adding the sub-assy overlay drawings, backing up that main assy overlay will still bring all of the drawings for the entire assy. So we do an overlay for each assy including only the items in the top level of that assy.  If there are sub-assys in it, we include the overlay for that sub-assy.  Makes printing a bit harder, but maintenance is easier.

[jludwig]

Do Overlay Drawings automatically update changes such as changing a dimension or adding a part to an assembly?

[dgschaefer]

Yes, they reflect the latest state of the drawing that is being overlaid.

[M.Shuler]

I have been searching for an answer like this for 2 years now. Thank you Doug!

[mvanderlugt]

You can use "Creo Distributed Batch" as Leonid has said, unfortunately in Creo 3.0 there is a bug and you have to run it several times to print them all. Still quicker than opening all the drawings.

The bug is shown here:

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS190903&posno=1&q=CS190903&nav=ptcproductgroups||creo||Product…