By Dennis Collin
Recently I talked about the various methods one could employ to solve problems of missing or corrupt AutoCAD drawings containing reference files.
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A common cause of missing files is the issuing person forgets to issue or upload all the relevant files to the recipient. Whilst External Reference Files can be embedded within a drawing, this is not always a desired outcome. There may be other files like raster images and plot files and other additional files that cannot be embedded in the drawing. Nevertheless, these files still need to be included in a document transmittal. The command for this has been in AutoCAD for many years and is called Etransmit.
Accessed from the application menu, or from Sheet Set manager, Etransmit first prompts to save the working file and then collects all associated files with any other user specified documents such as Excel spreadsheets, Word or PDF files.
Etransmit also can be configured for multiple recipients via the transmittal setups dialogue on the right-hand side.
Create a new setup for a recipient and modify the settings as desired. The resulting dialogue reveals many options, regarding how paths should be stored, file formats, display options etc.
If sending files externally, I normally specify a folder structure, although it must be ensured that relative paths have been set to Xrefs first! If using Etransmit , more as an archive tool, it is more usual to keep the files and folders as is.
Send email with transmittal will open the default email application and will automatically attached a zipped file and transmittal note to your message.
Setting plotter to ‘none’ is useful as it will avoid any ‘device not found’ error messages when opening the drawing at the other end. Purging the drawing is also a good policy as it cleans the drawing of any unused data, thereby reducing clutter and filesize.
Clicking on ‘OK’ will then create an issued copy for in a transmittal record folder and then attached the files as an email attachment like the image below.