Layer Tools

Two windows, different jobs

Drawing Standards is the catalogue's shop window: it shows the layer roles and creates the ones you want, with the properties the active style dictated. It is the window for starting a drawing to the right standard.

Layer Tools is the cleaning: it deletes hidden content, copies a layer name and converts layers in bulk. It is the window for fixing a drawing that already exists — including one that came from outside.

Neither depends on an alignment or on an active project; both depend on the style, because it is the style that resolves the names and the colours.

Drawing Standards

CAPCAD_LAYER_ASSISTANT opens the wide window; CAPCAD_LAYER_ASSISTANT_GENERAL opens the same window narrow. That is the only difference between the two commands: there is one window, modeless and single — running the other command while it is open only resizes it and brings it to the front.

The → / ← button (11) switches between the two widths at any time, so nothing is out of reach: the command only chooses which width the window opens with.

The screenshots on this page are of a Portuguese session; the numbering is the same in both editions, and the tables give the English captions.

Controls

The Style in use: label (wide mode only, to the right of the filter) shows the name of the style that resolved the list; with no style set, it shows capcad.default.

The columns of the list

The list carries the roles the catalogue resolves on its own, from the creation action alone: 156 of 187. The remaining 31 describe a family, not a layer — they need a suffix, a complement or a feature name to exist (GIS_, SUFFIX_IMP, CAPSIGN_TEXT_, ALIGNMENT_CURVAS_, EIXO_PREFIX_, DEFENSA_TERMINAL…) — and so they do not appear.

The Text & Dim tab (text and dimension standards) is not available in this version; the tab says so.

Workflow

1. Set the project's style first — it is the style that decides the names and colours the list will show.
2. Run CAPCAD_LAYER_ASSISTANT.
3. Type in the Filter (1) what you are after: ZPA, SINA_VERT, DEFENSA, zebrado…
4. Select the rows you want (Ctrl and Shift work) and click Create Selected Items (5). To create everything the filter left on screen, use Create All Layers… (6) and confirm.
5. To work on one specific layer, double-click it: the layer is created and becomes current.

The command line reports how many layers were created or updated.

Layer Tools

CAPCAD_LAYER_MANAGER opens a modal window with three independent tools.

Deleting the contents of hidden layers

This is the classic clean-up of a drawing received from a third party: what is off or frozen is usually the remains of old versions, but it still weighs on the file and reappears the moment someone turns the layer on.

Two things the command does not do, worth knowing:

• it does not delete the layer, only what is inside it — run the CAD's PURGE afterwards if you want the empty layers gone;
• it unlocks the layers that fall in the target and does not lock them back at the end.

Copying the layer name

This exists precisely to feed the converter just below: click an entity and paste the name into the left-hand column of the mapping.

The layer converter

Each line of field (6) is a pair. The preferred separator is =; if the line has no =, the command accepts a tab and, last, a comma — which lets you paste two columns straight out of a spreadsheet. The old name is compared case-insensitively; blank lines and lines with no separator are ignored.

OLD_MARKINGS=SINA_HOR_BR_LMS2
YELLOW LINES=SINA_HOR_AM_LFO3
OLD CENTRELINE=EIXO

Before moving any entity, the command creates every destination layer. It then walks model space and swaps the layer of every entity whose current name is in the left-hand column. The footer reports how many entities changed and how many pairs were used.

The name you type counts as typed. This is one of the documented exceptions to the layer catalogue: the destination layer is created under the name you wrote, not resolved through the catalogue. Writing SINA_HOR_BR_ZPA here creates a layer with that name, but without the colour, linetype and plot flag the role would carry — and without the style's prefix. To get the right layer with the right properties, create it first in Drawing Standards and then convert to the name shown there in the Layer CAD column.

Unlocking every layer

CAPCAD_LAYER_UNLOCK_ALL opens no window and asks for no selection: it unlocks every locked layer of the drawing, including 0, and reports on the command line how many were unlocked. It does not turn on layers that are off and it thaws nothing — a lock is only a lock.

Remembered between sessions

Nothing. Neither window writes its options to the preferences: the filter comes back empty, Redefine layers if different and Make Active come back ticked, the eraser target comes back to Off and the mapping field comes back empty on every run.

Notes

• Model space only. Both the eraser and the converter walk model space alone. Entities in paper space, inside block definitions or inside xrefs are not touched.
• Six boxes are not available in this version. The four category boxes (12 to 15) filter nothing, and Inherit properties and Restyle do not influence the conversion.
• One invalid layer name brings down the whole conversion. The command strips forbidden characters when creating the layer, but assigns to the entities the name as you typed it — so a <, a * or a colon in the destination makes the conversion fail as a block, with the error in the footer. Use names the CAD accepts.
• Creating is not the same as redefining. With (7) unticked, a layer that already exists in the drawing is only thawed and turned on; properties someone tuned by hand are preserved. That is the safe mode for third-party drawings.
• Four captions are not translated. The Categorias group box and its four boxes (12 to 15) show in Portuguese in every language, as do the Variável CapCad and Layer CAD column headers.
• Only the double click makes the layer current. That is the hint written on the window itself; the Make Active box does not change what the two create buttons do.

See also

• Linetypes — the other side of a layer's appearance: loading, creating and identifying dash patterns.
• CapStyle Editor — the editor's Layers tab and the QA: compare with DWG check.