Publishing (in Stereo)

So you're publishing in the background and you need to "plot something real quick". You hit the old plot button and you're faced with this message:


Great. Now what?

Here's the secret.

Open a second session of Civil 3D and plot from that session.

Yes, it's that simple.

I've been experimenting with using multiple sessions of Civil 3D 2009 and so far it seems more stable (knock on wood). So when I was faced with publishing a sheet set with a portion of the set using one page setup and the other portion using a different page setup, I gave the multiple sessions a try and it's working like a dream.

For this process, I have the 3GB switch enabled and I'm using Windows XP. I have my publishcollate variable set to 0 (zero) so the sheets are intermixed. I could have set my publishcollate variable to 1 (one) and the plot would have sent as one file then I could have the sheets in order for easier collating in the end. Since I had never tried to publish from multiple sessions of AutoCAD, I chose not to collate before sending to the printer. This way I could verify that the process was indeed working.