texupport

Starting with the 2007 releases, Autodesk included an HDI PDF driver along with AutoCAD and its vertical applications. This was a big selling point since many customers were misled into believing that they wouldn’t have to purchase 3rd party PDF writers for use with AutoCAD. Unfortunately, the “DWG to PDF” driver (pdfplot9) has several very limiting factors that make it useless to many if not most AutoCAD users.

1. It does not observe lineweights when using true type fonts.
2. When publishing multiple sheets, entities from any given layout may actually appear on the wrong page in the resulting PDF file(s).
3. The origin and margins are very limiting.

Despite these shortcomings, Autodesk still lists PDF output on their feature checklist, but the customers still have to look for a 3rd party solution.

Workarounds: Several users have reported good luck with various PDF drivers, including Adobe Acrobat, PDF995, Acroplot, Jaws, and many others.

If it’s hard to justify the added expense for a feature that AutoCAD is already supposed to include, PDFCreator is a nice Windows PDF driver.

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2007
Status as of 2008: Still reproducible.
Status as of 2009: Still reproducible.
Status as of 2010: Much imporved.

In AutoCAD 2008, when you try to add or remove toolbars, menus, palettes or panels to your workspace from within the CUI editor, it appears to save the changes when you exit the editor. When you’re back in the drawing window, however, none of your workspace edits are actually saved.

Workarounds:
This appears to be directly tied to turning on “Automatically save changes to workspace.” If “automatically save changes” is turned on, then the CUI editor does not work. If it is turned off, then editing in the CUI editor does work.  To check this setting, you must first exit the CUI editor and then run the WSSETTINGS command.

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2008
Status as of 2009: Appears to have been fixed.  Tough luck for all of the 2008 users who aren’t on subscription.

If you use xrefs regularly, scales from your xrefs can start to appear in your current drawing like this: 1″ = 30-0″_XREF_XREF_XREF

Workarounds: To reset the scale list in your drawing, run the following at your command line:

-scalelisteditRYE

To reset the scale list in every drawing that you open, put the following line into your acaddoc.lsp file.

(command "-scalelistedit" "R" "Y" "E")

First Appeared: AutoCAD 2008
Status as of 2008 SP1: Patched

In Land Desktop 2008, most profile manipulation commands simply do not work. This is absolutely inexcusable as profiling is integral to all civil design work. This is definitely a bug that warrants a pre-service pack hotfix. Autodesk’s reply to me is as follows:

Thank you for contacting Autodesk Support.

The issue that you are having is a known issue that development is looking into. It occurs when the surface or project name is 10 characters or more. This issue is scheduled to be fixed in the first service pack for the product due out in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, the only workaround available is to rename the surface less than 10 characters. Any alignment that previously referenced this surface will still contain the long surface name and will need to be deleted. If you use the Erase command in your drawing and then Undo, this will remove the alignment and will bring back the linework for you to redefine the alignment. Once this is done, you should be able to successfully recreate the profile and work with sections.

We apologize for the inconvenience this issue may cause. I wish there was an easier solution, but until the service pack is released, this is the best solution we have. Sorry.

Best Regards,

Autodesk Support Team