MicroStation CONNECT Edition delivers new printing and publishing enhancements. The following are just a few, of what I feel, are going to be the most popular. Refer to the “What’s New” documentation for a complete list.
Print Organizer Enhancements
The following enhancements have been made to Print Organizer:
• Support for printing PDF and Raster formats - Print Organizer now supports the following file formats.
Print Organizer System Collation Support - You can now duplex and collate plot sets when printing multiple copies to the Windows printer drivers (printer.pltcfg and interplot.pltcfg) from Print Organizer.
Single Print Dialog Enhancements
The single print dialog layout has been changed to enhance your printing experience.
Changes to the dialog include:
• New printer list for easier selection of a Windows or Bentley printer
• New Print / Print to File button
When Print to File is selected, the Save Print As dialog opens, to let you save the print file to a ProjectWise Datasource or to disk.
• Direct access to the Windows printer driver's Preferences dialog
New Publish PDF to Personal Share option is located on the Print Organizer and Single Print dialogs.
Personal Share is designed to allow a user to quickly share content to another user or set of users. The functionality is built into MicroStation while the CONNECTION client coordinates the file transfer.
This option displays only if the following conditions are met:
When selected, the PDF file is first written to the local drive. The CONNECTION client sends the file to the Personal Share in a separate background process. The file name on the Personal Share will be the same as the one on the local drive. If a file with the same name already exists in the Personal Share, it will be overwritten. However, if the local copy exists with the same name, the User will be prompted before overwriting the file.
Multiple access points to print to PDF
File > Print > Print to printer or to a file
File > Print > Print Organizer
File > Export > Exchange File Types > Adobe PDF
PDF/A-1b Standard added to PDF.PLTCFG
When set to PDF/A-1b, the system creates a PDF that is compliant with the PDF/A-1b standard. This PDF version is specialized for the digital preservation of electronic documents by limiting inclusion of items such as other files and external links to ensure long term readability.
MS_DGNLIBLIST_PRINTING
There is a new configuration variable for defining DGN libraries containing Print Styles.
Print styles are stored in the DGN file. In order to make the print styles available to all users, you should create them in a .dgnlib. By defining MS_DGNLIBLIST_PRINTING to reference the .dgnlib containing the print styles, printing interfaces will have access to the pre-defined print styles regardless of the active design file.
Submit to ProjectWise InterPlot Server / ProjectWise Dynamic Plot Service
The printing system lets you submit prints from both Print Organizer and the Print dialog to a ProjectWise InterPlot Server. There are several advantages when using this workflow:
A printer.pltcfg variant, interplot.pltcfg is also delivered. It is identical to printer.pltcfg except that it has the Default Send to InterPlot Server property set to True and weight maps configured for weight 1 = 1 dot, weight 2 = 2 dots, etc.
Rendering Attributes File Name has been added to PRINTER.PLTCFG and INTERPLOT.PLTCFG
Rendering attributes allow you to control plotter-specific settings that affect the appearance of the plot, such as plot labels, patterning modes, and rendering modes. The Graphical Attribute Editor utility is used to create and edit rendering attribute files and typically resides on a ProjectWise InterPlot Server.
Note: This property is only used by the Windows printer driver configurations (e.g. printer.pltcfg and interplot.pltcfg) when the Send to InterPlot server or Send to InterPlot submit options are selected in Print Organizer or the Print dialog.