Batch Printing?

Try looking in Start menu, All Programs, Solidworks. etc

I know we're having to write a program in-house for batch-printing. So far we've ran into problems accessing files in the vault to print them... but we've overcome that finally. We're able to access them from the vault and open them in EDrawings.. we're working out some bugs, but we're hoping to be able to stamp them in EDrawings with the job number and date and then print.

The biggest obstacle that we've had to conquer has been tying the drawing to the part or assembly. SolidWorks can find the drawing the part is on if they're named the same thing and in the same location, but we don't name our drawings the same thing as our assemblies, and we still do multiple parts on one drawing, so that makes it even harder. What we ended up doing was adding a field to the part and assembly cards for the associated drawing and having users type it in. Then I have a field on the BOM that holds that variable. We then go to the top-most level drawing and save it's BOM out as a CSV file so we end up with a column in the CSV file of all the drawings we need the print. Then our batch plot routine goes through that column and ignores duplicates (multiple parts per drawing again).. and prints them.

It would be really nice if PDM Enterprise could include some kind of Batch Printing like this. And I've seen a lot of requests for people wanting watermarks and such at print-time, so that'd be a nice feature for them to include. If you could just click a button and print a column in the BOM or something it'd be a improvement over what we have now... which is nothing... and printing a column in the BOM gives you some flexibility over what to print since we can customize the BOMs, so that'd help it to work for more people.

We have PDMWE 2008 and it doesn't have batch printing in it, and I haven't seen anything about it in 2009 either.