CTB or STB not used when publishing, but plots single sheets correctly

August 10, 2020 Ryan Wunderlich

Issue:

You received a drawing from an outside consultant\vendor\resource and have saved the CTB (or STB) of their plotting standards to the same location as the DWG you are opening and it will plot correctly, but when publishing, the plot styles are not honored. You can also Fatal Error AutoCAD when attempting to preview the sheets.

Causes:

This is normal behavior. The CTB/STB is honored with a single sheet plot, since you are using the full AutoCAD engine. When publishing, it’s using a separate acad.exe process that only honors the file support search paths and doesn’t honor the CTB/STB location (where you opened the drawing from).

Solution:

You can either copy the CTB to your standards location (or to your local profile), or you can create a separate directory with other CTB/STB files outside your standards and add that additional path to your Plot Style Table Search Path in your AutoCAD options:

2020-08-06_14-42-27

About the Author

Ryan Wunderlich

Sr. Technical Support Specialist<br><br>An AutoCAD Certified Professional, Ryan is responsible for taking client cases and assisting with issues with the software - everything from regular glitches to software deployments and whatever else goes wrong. He's proficient in AutoCAD (including customization), VBA, LISP, and Civil 3D.

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