Exporting Sheets as PDFs

In this post, we discussed the automatic creation and population of view sheets. We can also automate the export those sheets as PDFs - in my company, for instance, we do this every week to ensure that our clients, who do not use Revit itself, always have access to relatively up-to-date design information.

To start, we'll collect all the sheets in our file and filter for the ones we want to export. There are two things to note here. Firstly, regardless of how many sheets we want to export, we need a list (if we only want one, we'll have a list containing a single item). Secondly, the list should not contain the sheet objects themselves but their IDs. 

    doc = DocumentManager.Instance.CurrentDBDocument
 
    sheets = FilteredElementCollector(doc).OfClass(ViewSheet).ToElements()
    names_of_sheets_to_export = ["Lorem", "Ipsum"]
    sheets_to_export = [sheet.Id for sheet in sheets if sheet.Name in names_of_sheets_to_export]
Once we have our sheets, we'll create an instance of PDFExportOptions(). By setting the properties of this object, we can specify how we want our PDF to look. For a full list of the possible options, check out the PDFExportOptions Class of the Revit API Documentation. 
    opt = PDFExportOptions()
    opt.FileName = "Lorem Ipsum"
    opt.Combine = True #Combines all the sheets in our list into a single file
Now, we'll pass all that, along with the path of the folder in which we want to save our PDF, to Export(). 
    target_path = fr"lorem\ipsum\dolor\sit"
  
    doc.Export(target_path, sheets_to_export, opt)
If we have PDFs from multiple files we wish to combine, we can use a library like pypdf to do so.

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