Vault 2015 - AutoCAD DWF Preview

by David Gate

When Vaulting AutoCAD files if you go with the default settings the preview DWFs go in with all the colours as displayed in the AutoCAD environment.

This can be quite hard to see on a white background. The Design Review background colour can be overridden but if you have users printing these DWFs via the webclient or an external DWF publish location the colours again will cause issues.

One option is to change the way the DWFs are published. Ideally a nice simple black on white.

To make these changes first you will need someone logged into the Vault as an Administrator.

Then in Vault go to Tools > Administration > Vault Settings

Then head to the Visualization tab. And to the Publish Options.

 In the drop down pick AutoCAD,

Make sure the Plot with Plot Styles is ticked.

Repeat for the other versions of AutoCAD.

Ie AutoCAD Mechanical etc as just to cover all bases.

Ok all of the dialog boxes.

Then close and reopen Vault and AutoCAD and log in as your normal user.

Now for any AutoCAD file you check in it will create the DWF based on your chosen plot settings in that DWG. It is quite likely that your plot settings are set correctly in your AutoCAD files to allow you to easily print them.

In case your plot styles are not quite right follow the below steps to tweak them.

In the AutoCAD file, right click on the Model (or Layout if your using that) tab in the bottom left-hand corner.

Pick the Page Setup Manager.

Then modify the Page Setup.

Then set the following. The important ones being the plot style being set to monochrome.ctb and the use plot styles option.

The monochrome.ctb does rely on all your layers using standard AutoCAD colours.

You can preview the plot style to check how the DWF will look.

After a save and check in the DWF created for that file will be black on white.

You can check the DWF in the Vault as this will match the one in your external folder location.

I hope that helps and makes your Vault previewing easier.