Good news for Mac users: AutoCAD 2018 for Mac has graduated to the latest update, 2018.1. A few new features—including faster plotting, drag-and-drop and automatic PDFs—should make for a smoother user experience.
One main new enhancement is that users can more easily discover updates and improvements to AutoCAD with a visual indicator on the relevant icon. Starting in this release, if you see an orange dot on an icon, you can hover over it to learn what’s new and improved with that feature.
The orange dot in the picture above reveals two other updates. First, users can now make AutoCAD remember their previous plot settings as default; second, a new “Save as PDF” button allows users to easily save their drawings as PDFs. In fact, when users plot drawings, a PDF of those drawings will be automatically created. The name of the PDF will be taken from the drawing and layout name for easy reference.
AutoCAD for Mac 2018.1 also simplifies the process of applying page setups to multiple layouts. Users can right-click on a drawing to apply a named page setup to multiple layouts from Quick View or from the Layout tab menu.
“Applying plot settings to multiple layouts is a great enhancement,” said Bob Manthey, an early tester. “It’s most important to me on older drawings. I work with several other people using traditional AutoCAD (PC)—and for some reason, they do not properly set up their plot settings. When I open their drawings, I can easily set up plotting and apply it to all of the layouts easily.”
A couple final enhancements round out the 2018.1 update:
- When purging objects, prompts are presented to turn on nested items and orphaned data, saving users from purging multiple times.
- Users can drag-and-drop files from the Mac Finder directly onto the AutoCAD canvas.
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