3D DWF Publishing
AutoCAD 2006 ships with a preview version of the new 3D DWF Publishing tools. This toolset allows you to generate 3D DWF files that are very lightweight and usable with very little effort for your clients to use over 2D DWF files. In order to get the commands to work from in AutoCAD you need to install the feature during the installation process of AutoCAD. Once it has been installed you use the 3DDWFPUBLISH command to generate the 3D DWF file.



Previewing Line Merge
The Line Merge feature that has been not been available for previewing a drawing. Print preview will now respect the Line Merge setting if it has been setup for the plotter before hand.

External Reference Notification
The External Reference Notification balloon has gotten a slight make-over, but it does leave more to be desired though. The change to the balloon in AutoCAD 2006 eliminates one step, but can cause an undesired side affect though. The link in the balloon now will reload the Xref automatically when clicked, but it will do a reload on all the Xrefs attached to the drawing. That means all of the Xrefs that are marked as Unloaded are reloaded into the drawing.



Sheet Set Enhancements
There have been some enhancements made to the Sheet Set Manager that make it much more functional this time around. The following list outlines that many changes in the Sheet Set Manager for AutoCAD 2006.

• The Sheet roll-up on the Sheet List tab now has a "Refresh sheet status" button that will update all the sheets in the Sheet Set. If a drawing has been opened since the Sheet Set was last refreshed it will display a new lock icon in the lower-left corner of the sheet icon. The Sheet Set Manager by default will refresh automatically every 60 seconds. The time interval can be adjusted via the SSMPOLLTIME system variable.
  
  
  
• Multiple Sheets can be selected and opened for edit or as read-only via the right-click menu.
  
  
  
• Multiple Sheets can now be imported which will make setting Sheet Sets up faster and more efficiently.
  
  
  
• Sheet Set Publish Options have been tweaked to include three new options called Sheet set information, Sheet information and Block information. The dialog box has also been re-laid out too.
  
  
  
• Renaming Sheet has been improved to allow you to rename a drawing file to the Sheet’s title automatically. It is now possible to navigate forward and backward through the Sheets in a subset.
  
  
  
• The contents of the View List tab can be displayed in two different ways. These two ways are by Category or by Sheet.
  
  
  
• The Sheet Set Properties has been expanded for a Sheet Set to include a new category called Project Control. The properties that are available under this section are Project number, Project name, Project phase and Project milestone.
  
  
  
• The Create Sheet Set Wizard has a new option called "Create a folder hierarchy based on subsets.". This helps you to manage your files just like you see them in the Sheet Set Manager.
  
• When creating a new subset you now have an option called "Create folders relative to parent subset storage location.". What this allows for is to create a new folder on the drive located in the same folder as the subset or Sheet Set. Then any new Sheet that is added to the Sheet Set Manager they will be created in the folder that corresponds to the subset by default on the drive.