Print Packets

[Bryan O]

General Question,
WE produce cabinets and furniture.
Our Manufacturing has asked Product Design to provide print packages (Top Level Assemblies, All Subs, and components in 1 drawings).
Currently we supply them with induvial drawings (PDF) (asm & part separately )on a common network drive and it is their responsibility to collect the drawings.
I think a single drawings would be great for them but a hassle for our designers.
File sizes of assemblies and parts within 1 SW drawing would be huge and run slow and a pain to manage.
Asking the PD to combine PDFs would get push back.

Just curious how others handle this.
(Sounds like a job for an enterprise system)

[josh]

Putting all parts and assemblies into one SW file is terrible. Highly recommend against this.
Combining all PDFs in a folder into a single multipage PDF is pretty trivial with the right tool. Irfanview is free and can do this in a few seconds. Doesn't sound like that should be too much work for Product Design group.

[TTevolve]

I sometimes use multiple sheets on a drawing in SW when I need to clear thing up or add extra views, but it's a pain when you start getting to many sheets in a single drawing. If you are using PDF's that where you should combine them, it's way easier to combine PDF's then to keep adding multiple parts across multiple sheets in a single drawing.

[Frederick_Law]

Combine them in PDF is much easier.
Get a copy of Acrobat.

[AlexLachance]

General Question,
WE produce cabinets and furniture.
Our Manufacturing has asked Product Design to provide print packages (Top Level Assemblies, All Subs, and components in 1 drawings).
Currently we supply them with induvial drawings (PDF) (asm & part separately )on a common network drive and it is their responsibility to collect the drawings.
I think a single drawings would be great for them but a hassle for our designers.
File sizes of assemblies and parts within 1 SW drawing would be huge and run slow and a pain to manage.
Asking the PD to combine PDFs would get push back.

Just curious how others handle this.
(Sounds like a job for an enterprise system)

We used to use CustomTools to do a batch run and create one huge PDF, which took quite a while.

Now, it's integrated into our ERP. We select the item we want and have a binder created of all items that have drawings. The ERP looks on our server for PDF's with the name of the items contained and merges them all together into one "binder". It takes less then 30 seconds to do in that manner.


edit: Added an image to clarify, an image is worth 1000 words. This is a binder of ACCE-A015. It contains ACCE-049 which has a drawing, so it picked both drawings and merged them as one.