AutoCAD 2016: Auto Publish

By Justin Doughty

After a recent discussion, I thought I would share a quick tip on a very rarely used feature in all versions of AutoCAD.

This is Auto Publish. Auto Publish lets us automatically create a document with every save or close, keeping track of any changes to the drawing. It is setup and can be controlled using the AUTOPUBLISH command or in the options menu:

We can choose what command to publish with (save, close or give prompts), what to save, where to save it and in what file format.

I can see many uses for this. We can keep track of changes to the drawing layouts or model using auto publish to PDF or DWF.

This history of non-editable files could then be used for other project members to view, or could even be uploaded to A360 or other cloud service, so the team on site have the very latest information.

The biggest plus is for the AutoCAD users, this is all done automatically, without any additional commands.