How to Setup Your AutoCAD Workstation – Part 1, Open and Print

Part 1 of ???

I’m starting a series of posts to document what I need to do when I (re)install AutoCAD. These are just the beginning customizations that are necessary to make a default install useful in a work environment. This is going to be a scatterbrained list of things and I’ll add more in later posts as I think of them. And yes, a lot of this could be done by making custom deployments, but those deployments don’t just come out of thin air.

This is what you would need to do to make a fresh AutoCAD install open a DWG and plot it as it was intended.

Find the fonts, line styles, plotters, plot style tables, etc. that you would need to plot your DWG. If you’ve ever used ETRANSMIT, these are the sort of things that are found in the zip file created by ETRANSMIT.

Put your custom fonts etc. in the places where AutoCAD expects to find them.

Now you could dump these files into the appropriate folders on your C: drive, but that only works well in a one-man shop. Since you probably have company standard fonts and plot style tables you should have a common folder on the network where everyone can access these files. This should make things easier. All you have to do is copy the path to that folder and paste the path into the appropriate field in your Options.

Bring up your Options screen and go to the Files tab. Paste in the path to the FONTS and SUPPORT folders into the Support File Search Path. The list of folders is processed with priority going to the ones higher on the list. So put your custom FONTS and SUPPORT folders

Next, replace the paths in the Printer Support File Paths with the paths to your custom plotters, plot styles etc.

If everything was setup correctly, your PLOT dialog box will look something like this:

If it is not setup correctly, it will look something like this: