On the Markup & Measure tab in ADR, pull down the Symbols button at the end of the panel. Once the block template file has been published, Autodesk ® Design Review will open the DWFx file you just created. When you return to the Publish Options screen, hit OK, then Publish on the main Publish window. The extension of a block template file is. You will be prompted for a file name and location. When you have selected all of the blocks and properties you wish to publish, hit Save. I generally uncheck all of the properties except for “Name”. The properties will be used later to decide how your symbols appear in the menu in Autodesk ® Design Review. This will create a list of all unique blocks in the source drawing, as well as properties from those blocks. Your source drawing will appear in the top section of the dialog that opens. If this is your first go around, Create will be your choice. A list of available files, or Create and Edit are your choices. Click in that field, and grab the down arrow on the right. Then go to the next line for Block template file. In the middle section under DWF data options, Block Information, set to Include.

The shot below is the sub-dialog that opens. Then on the right hand top of the dialog box, select the Publish Options… button. In DWG True View, Use the Publish tool under File, Publish. This was one of the details I found hard to find help for. Now the secret is in creating and using a Block Template file.

Open the drawing in Autodesk ® DWG True View software. The procedure starts out simply enough, you need to create an Autocad drawing file (.dwg) containing a collection of blocks that you would like to group as a catalog in Design Review. I’m posting it here to hopefully save some folks from having to do all the research across all of those other sites. Piecing together information from several of these sites I was able to figure out a procedure that makes this actually quite simple. The procedures for this seem to be spread out between Autodesk ® Design Review help files, Autodesk ® DWG TrueView help files, and a number of Autodesk ® Discussion Forum posts on several different forums. I’m referring to creating a custom symbol catalog for Autodesk ® Design Review, using blocks from Autodesk ® Autocad. In this entry I address something fairly simple, and yet so (IMHO) poorly documented, that it took me quite some time and a few grey hairs to nail down the procedure.

Autodesk design review 2018