What’s New in 12d Synergy 4.3 Part 4 – CAD Management

12d Synergy 4.3 introduces a range of exciting new features designed to increase the efficiency and mobility of your data management. This article is the fourth in our seven-part series exploring these features: what they do, their benefits and how to use them. In this post you’ll learn how 12d Synergy 4.3 can improve the automation and efficiency of your CAD workflows.

You can also read about the other features in 12d Synergy 4.3 including Folders Templates, Offline Mode, CAD Management, CAD to PDF Publisher and Internal Issuing.

Managing CAD’s extensive data can quickly become a task bigger than Ben Hur.

Inevitably (and rather annoyingly), this encompasses time-consuming and repetitive tasks across your hundreds of drawings: title block data entry, publishing to PDF and more.

This is where 12d Synergy comes in handy; letting you simplify and automate how you manage your drawings, references and attributes with our CAD management tools.

In 12d Synergy 4.3, we’ve introduced three specialised CAD features so can spend less time managing your CAD data, and more time working on it: CAD to PDF Publisher, Layout Tracking and CAD PDF Tracking.

CAD to PDF Publisher

Publishing from CAD can be a time-consuming process, even with scripts.

With 12d Synergy 4.3’s CAD Publisher, all your drawings can be published to PDF from within the 12d Synergy client. This process is completely streamlined, enabling publishing without opening any DWGs. It’s faster, completely automatic, easier (with no scripting), and saves you time and money.

There’s so much more to explore with this feature, so we’ve dedicated an article (and a video!) to it! Learn everything you need to know about CAD Publishing here .

Layout Tracking

12d Synergy Version 4 introduced the ability to import layers from a DWG, including title block attributes, and manage them in a spreadsheet-style editor with our Title Block Manager.

12d Synergy 4.3 now automatically detects layout changes (new, removed or updated layouts) at check-in, and prompts whether you would like to push these changes into 12d Synergy’s Layout Editor.

12d Synergy’s new Layout Tracker is a safeguard against duplications of layout names when adding a new layout or renaming sheets. Giving you better control over your attributes, and greater flexibility in how you work and manage your title blocks.

To get an insight into the Layout Tracking process, check out the video below:

Watch: CAD Layout Tracking – 12d Synergy 4.3

CAD PDF Tracking

12d Synergy 4.3 allows you to track the connection between DWG and PDF, so you know exactly which DWGs the PDFs were published from.

You can also pull your CAD attributes, such as layout name, into your PDFs, as file attributes or include them in the filename.

DXE Support

12d Synergy 4.3 now supports tracking between DWG and Data Extraction Files (DXE). DXE files are a consolidation of data links, such as Excel CSV files, which can be referenced in AutoCAD, similar to Xrefs.

As such, the DXE relationship to individual files is now tracked in and supported 12d Synergy. However, whilst DXE’s cam be managed in 12d Synergy, we can’t create DXE files ourselves.

Upgrade to 12d Synergy 4.3

All 12d Synergy users have free access to the new features in 12d Synergy 4.3 – which can be downloaded from the 12d Synergy Downloads page right here!

Continue to Part 5: CAD to PDF Publisher in 12d Synergy 4.3

Want to save time and money publishing DWG’s from CAD?  Learn all about the brand-new CAD to PDF Publisher feature in 4.3 here!