ICS Improvements to Multi-File processing

The latter presents a host of difficult user experience difficulties.  Aside from needing to add a non-trivial page order control to ProjectWise Explorer's Create Renditions dialog, multiple sheets per DGN and per model are common.  In order to present the sheets for proper sequencing, the DGNs would first have to be copied out and examined -- an expensive operation.  Even more difficult if logic in the settings file has to be applied in order to find and filter print boundaries from shapes in the model; PW Explorer does not currently have that capability.  The PWE Create Renditions dialog wasn't intended to replace the full functionality of InterPlot Organizer.

Your first suggestion would be more easily accomplished.  However, in a well-standardized environment, the majority of the work involved with creating and maintaining an IPS file is keeping the DGN/sheet list up to date.  Presumably the same .set files used in the iCS for PDF rendition profiles are available to the administrator maintaining the IPS file and would be used.  I can see some benefit in allowing the contents of an IPS to be renditioned from PWE using different a Presentation, but it doesn't seem like it would be a feature much in demand.  Most of the time I'd expect the IPS to already be configured with the proper Presentation, and of course with the sheets already arranged.

In our shop, a lead designer updates and maintains a project IPS file all to way until submittal time.  For us, it is the definitive list of all sheets to be plotted for the project.  Typically, the printer is set for one of our physical printers, along with a matching printer settings file from the IPlot server is applied.

When our designers want to use ICS to quickly create a rendition of existing IPS plot set, they have to open the IPS file, change the printer, apply a settings file from the ProjectWise (not the IPlot server), save and check-in, then run IPS.

I assume the problem is that the driver for the physical printer uses a set of custom paper size names different from the standard Windows forms database.  To deal with that, you can install the same printer driver on the iCS for PDF server, create a Windows printer using that driver (you can set the port to FILE if the server can't see the physical printer), configure InterPlot to use that printer instead of the generic ProjectWise printer it creates (look for IP_DCS_RENDITION_PRINTER in C:\Program Files (x86)\ProjectWise InterPlot Organizer\config\ip.cfg), then use the same .set files for PDF creation as you use for physical paper output.  The workflow you describe definitely should not be necessary.

We create a virtual printer queue on every plot server using the same driver and having the same name on each server, this printer is configured to plot to the NUL: port so it never actually prints anything that goes to it. We also setup a set of sheet sizes on every plot server. We do the same on our ICS server.

We recommend our users using InterPlot Organizer or Print Organizer to create PDFs to use that printer in their IPS/PSET files. If they are creating a IPS for use with renditions we tell them to specifically use the VirtualPlot queue shared from the ICS server.

We also put:

printer=\\ics_server_name\print_queue

in every SET file we setup for use with ICS.

About the only thing we have to do for this system now is add the occasional odd paper size that we don't already create.

We also discourage our users from using IPS files for ICS because they've been unstable for us. Not sure what it is about our workflows that cause this but we find IPS files just stop working after a while.

We now try to setup renditions so users can just right-click on a file (or set of files), select Create Rendition and then Click OK and get exactly what they need for that project.  No need to mess with an IPS file at all. We typically use either the Sheet Model name or Sheet Description name for the PDF file name depending on the project.