This week marks the first release of information from Autodesk regarding Inventor Publisher 2012. This looks to be a big release, which is somewhat surprising – after all, Publisher 2011 R1 was released just a few months ago. For those of you that have been paying attention, R1 brought detail views, section planes, and parts lists to the relatively new application. Publisher 2012 keeps up the momentum with enhancements to these features and more.
One of the most significant new upgrades to Publisher is the ability to set publish areas for each of your snapshots. This enables a “what you see is what you get” finished product and reduces guesswork when laying out your illustrations. Though it’s not one of the big-ticket features for this release, I’ve found it invaluable in practice.
Now, the feature that everyone’s been waiting for: dimensions. Publisher 2012 will allow you to create linear, angular, and radial dimensions in any plane you’d like. Like any annotations in Publisher, the dimensions can be easily customized; importantly, they will maintain associativity to the source model. This allows users to complete entire detailing workflows using just Publisher.
Those using Microsoft Word for technical document authoring will want to pick up Publisher 2012 as soon as possible. With the new Publisher add-in for Word, users can place associative images and text by browsing through thumbnails directly in Word. Once the image is placed, it’s easy to adjust the image’s publish size to your document. Since the images and text are synced back to your Publisher file, you’ll never need to replace an image again.
In addition to all of this, Publisher has also received a significant speed boost: it’s sporting a faster import time for most CAD formats, including Inventor (no surprise here). One significant upgrade is the new View Fidelity slider, which lets you adjust the level of anti-aliasing applied to your view. In plain English, you’ll get a much smoother image with slider adjusted to the right. That said, you’ll probably want to place the slider somewhere in the middle for day-to-day exploding or annotating.
Users may also be interested in Publisher's new Visual Parts Lists, which allow you to add customizable thumbnail images for each component in your list. Also, those migrating from AutoCAD will find the ability to use AutoCAD blocks as annotations very useful. All in all, Inventor Publisher 2012 looks to be another great release for a quickly evolving product. I'll leave you with another outline video from our friend Rob Cohee.
Comments