Publish Command Running Slow

Hello all. I am brand new to this forum and I have a question regarding the publish command. Over the past few months at work, I've been finding that drawings that are batch plotted to our xerox printer have been coming out painfully slow (like 2 drawings per minute in a set of 20). This bottle neck could be related to our server, but this is a very new problem and our network hardware has not changed over this time. It's a big pain when we are wanting to plot up to 200 drwaings and we have to wait until after buisness hours because we can't be tying up the Xerox for the whole office. This problem is at it's worst when printing drawings with several xref's (some of which are up to 5MB). But like I said, even large drawings were printing quite quickly several months ago. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Have you tried publishing plot files first and then sending the plot files to the printer? We find this method much less time consuming in our office.

I haven't tried that but to be honest I have no idea how i would go about publishing plot files separately. This would involve using the publish command twice?

No, it would only involve publishing once.

If all the drawings have a similar set up, open one of the drawings, and say print,

in the print dialogue box, tick the box "plot to file"

then click apply to set up.

Save this print set up with a name of your choice.

You may have to check the printer properties to check that this option is availabe too.

(click properties, there are 3 tabs at the top click the second, and there is a box here that u need to tick to allow plot to file)

Save your drawing then

Go to the publish command,

add all the drawings you require and apply this new print setup that u have created to all the drawings.

Click publish Options and choose the settings you require such as location of where it should save the files, publish in background etc(it is quicker not to publish in background though). Publishing in background just means u can carry on working while autocad is publishing.

Click publish

When it is finished got to the folder you specified for the files and you should have a file for each and every drawing you want a print of.

Then send these to your printer. We use software called View Companion pro. This allows us to send a whole batch at once without opening the files even. This program also allows us to convert the files to pdf files extremely quickly too. This method also enabes us to have a digital version of the drawing that we have sent out

hope this helps you somewhat.