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Publish to print messes up the order


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We're running VW2019 SP3 and when we publish a batch of drawings directly to print, the order goes awry. Instead of drawings 1,2,3,4 etc. it goes 1,3,2,5,11,22,4 etc. - incredibly frustrating! It even does this when printing two sided which completely ruins the set, at least with single sided you can rearrange. 

 

Is there any reason why this seems to happen and a potential fix other than exporting to PDF and then printing the PDF?

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The order you are stating sounds strange, but that definitely sounds like a Text sorting versus Numeric sorting problem.

 

The field you are using is probably stored as Text. That way if you need sheet 3A you can have it rather than just numbers. 

 

But when you have a Text field it sorts using alphabetic (ASCII) sorting rather than numeric.

 

So it sorts by the first character, then by the second character, then the third, etc. So you get something like:

 

1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 47, 48, 5 ....

 

The traditional work around for this is to use leading zeros so that all of the numbers are the same number of characters.

 

01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 10, 11, 47, 48.  

 

If you need more than 99 sheet you need to pad to 3 characters,  001, 002, 010, 011,  etc.

 

But send Nikolay a movie anyway so he can make sure there is not another bug hiding here.

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The numbers I used were just indicative, in reality we use 3 digits, (100s for planning, 200s for demolitions/site, 300s for general arrangements etc) so the numbers were late 290s and then into 300s - there were no letters (although we do occasionally do a 330 and 330a for example). The order was something like 298, 303, 299, 320, 350, when it should have been 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 310, 311, 312, 313, 320.

 

We have the jumps because we'll do 300-309 for plans, then 310-319 for 4 elevations, 320-329 for sections, 330-339 for M&E etc, and there aren't always enough storeys/sheets to fill take up all the numbers, but doing it in multiples of 10s gives us some flexibility if things are added - perhaps this causes problems? . It was still printing as I wrote the post, but the strangest thing was that it duplicated the same sheet (350) about 5-10 times before I stopped it.

 

I'll upload a movie a bit later but thanks for your replies.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hello @_James,

 

The first thing that caught my eye was that your naming scheme is messed up. How did you create it? Make sure to use the popup for inserting new formulas and add your custom text only between 2 formulas and not in a single formula, which will result in invalid formula. Try printing with one of the default naming schemes and let me know if you still get messed up order.

 

Thanks,

Nikolay Zhelyazkov

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@Nikolay Zhelyazkov An update to this - not only did publish to print mess the order up, but it was incredibly slow to print. It would pause for minutes (not exaggerating) between sheets. It would take over an hour to print around 70 sheets - this was from a project sharing file.

 

We have since converted the file (for an unrelated reason) to a normal .vwx file rather than .vwxw/.vwxp and the print speed is significantly better. There is no wait between sheets, and the set just prints out as expected. 

 

Any idea what's causing this and if it can be remedied? If you would like a copy of the files please let me know.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Hello @_James,

 

I have looked into this for some time. I have noticed that you have a field in Sheet Data that has empty name, which is causing the naming schemes to be messed up (I think I did not see this before). Could you try deleting this field and then printing and tell me if you still have problems?

 

Best Regards,

Nikolay Zhelyazkov

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  • 3 weeks later...

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