TABLE OF CONTENTS Plotting and publishing are flip sides of the same coin. You plot when printing a single layout or model space view and publish when printing information from more than one drawing it's output by any other name.
Bear in mind that the commonplace act of printing has become an abstraction in AutoCAD. No trees are felled when you plot and publish in intangible electronic forms such as DWF, PDF, ZIP, or even HTML and great efficiencies are realized for those who go 100 percent digital. But for the traditional majority who isn't quite there yet, plotting and publishing still have the connotation of printing on paper.
However you and your organization go about creating output, this chapter offers you tips and techniques for communicating your design ideas to the rest of the world.
In all other applications it's called printing, but AutoCAD is so special that making output deserves its own verb. You plot in AutoCAD. We feel (and some people remember) that the origin of this term hearkens back to the days of vector pen plotters: When the paper moved back and forth in the X direction, the pen carousel moved in Y, and lines were plotted within this physical coordinate space.
Today, almost all output devices are raster, meaning they translate the vector math from AutoCAD into pixels just prior to printing. We're not really plotting anymore technically speaking, that is. But don't think that's ever going to stop us from plotting!
