Important: Since the release of promis.e V8i 08.11.07.82 (Service Pack 1 / SELECTseries 1), the procedures in this document are not necessary for many users who will find that using Project Manager > File > Plot Pages(s) now works adequately "out of the box". To change the default settings, see Changing the Default Print Settings
This document now serves mainly as a reference, and remains a guide for promis.e V8i users who have not yet upgraded to the latest version.
With the V8i version of promis.e, the multi-page plotting is handled by the Print Organizer function of Bentley MicroStation and MicroStation PowerDraft. The Print Organizer can be initiated from either File > Plot Page(s) in the promis.e Project Manager or File > Print Organizer from the main MicroStation/PowerDraft menu.
There are several parameters which can be changed to make multi-page printing easier and quicker to use than using the out-of-the-box settings.The first change is to select the desired folder to start in when selecting drawings to be plotted. By default this path is:
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Bentley\PowerDraft\WorkSpace\Projects\Untitled\dgn
This is usually a long way from where your projects are stored so it adds time searching for your files to plot. To change this, select the Workspace > Configuration command from the MicroStation/PowerDraft menu and scroll down on the top-right section to the parameter MS_DEF.
Click the Edit button and type or paste the new "start in" path.
The new path should be typed over the existing text as shown below. Click the OK button when finished.
Click the OK button on the Configuration dialog and the starting point for your adding pages should now be this new location.
The Print Organizer can be made to work quickly and efficiently for promis.e with a little bit of initial setup work. The key to achieving this lies in the understanding of print styles, their settings, and where they are stored. Print styles can either be stored in a particular drawing files or in a library file (with the extension .dgnlib).
promis.e uses a library file called promisev8i.dgnlib. (For MicroStation/PowerDraft V8i SELECTseries 1 and higher, the file is promiseV8iSR1.dgnlib).
Adding a print style to this dgnlib file will make the print style available whenever promis.e is running, regardless of the drawing page open or if a drawing page is open at all.
Open the promisev8i.dgnlib file using the File > Open command and change the "Files of type" to DGN Library Files(*.dgnlib). Make sure that the Read-Only option is turned off, otherwise all print style options will be grayed out. Then browse to and select the following file:
C:\Program Files\Bentley\promis-e\Support\promisev8i.dgnlib (This path is no longer the path used by recent versions of promis.e; the .dgnlib file will be found in a subfolder of the Program Data folder. Also, as noted above, the .dgnlib file to modify is promiseV8iSR1.dgnlib when the platform is MS/PD V8i SS1 and higher).
Open the Print Organizer using the File > Print Organizer command and select Tools > Define Print Styles.
Click on the New button (icon shows a white page) to create a print style.
Right click the new print style and select Rename. Give it a meaningful name, such as ‘A4LaserJet'.
This tab should be filled in with the basic information about what to print, what size paper will be used, and where it should appear on the page. An example is shown below. Notice that the Full Sheet option is not selected. Selecting this can result in the edge of the drawing being beyond the printer's bounds.
Set the Print Area to "Fence"
Set View to "View 1"
Set Size and scale to "Maximize"
Set Paper size and Orientation as desired.
Set the Color option to Monochrome, Grey Scale, or True Color as desired.
This tab allows you to define a particular view and area of the drawing to output. In some cases you may have several views/models stored with the page in which case they will all be scheduled to print in that session. On the Fence tab you can filter just certain views to output.
In previous versions of promis-e there have been "Layout 1" or "Layout 2" entries which may need filtering out, the above "Listed models" option will prevent these from appearing.
Enable the Fit to master model option.
The easiest option here is to simply select the preferred Windows printer from the list provided.
Once these settings have been applied, save the settings by clicking the floppy disk icon.
You can set this print style as a default print style. This will make the print style automatically applied to drawings as they are added to the Print Organizer for plotting. If you will have multiple print styles defined for different printers/plotters or color options, you can make the most commonly used style the default, or do not make any styles a default print style. To make a print style a default style, right click it and select Default Print Style or click the button that looks like a check mark.
Be sure to save the promisev8i.dgnlib file before going on to the next step.
Now that the print sytle has been defined in the library file, you can test it by printing out a few pages from a project.
You do not have to open the project with the Project Manager to print pages from a particular project. Simply selectFile > Plot Page(s) in the Project Manager or File > Print Organizer in the main MicroStation menu.
Click the Add Files to Set button to add drawings to the print set.
Click the Add button and you should be presented with the default folder set up at the beginning of this document via the MS_DEF parameter. Browse to and select the files to be printed.
The default print style will be applied to all the drawings being added when you click OK. If you want to apply a different print style, click the button that looks like a magnifying glass and select the desired print style from the resulting Apply Print Style dialog:
You can now preview the pages to make sure that they will look print as desired efore sending them to the printer as a batch. This can be done either by selecting an individual page and clicking on the preview button or by selecting a group of pages and using the green arrow buttons on the preview window.
To print the set of drawings, select File > Print from the Print Organizer menu.