AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 Bible

Chapter 11. Organizing Drawings with Layers, Colors, Linetypes, and Lineweights

Until you learn about layers, you draw everything in black or white. Drawing everything in one color is not a very good way to draw—besides, it's boring! If everything is the same color, it's hard to distinguish the various elements of a drawing. If you've followed the exercises throughout this book, you've opened some drawings from the DVD that used various colors and linetypes (such as dashed lines). For example, in some of the architectural drawings, you may have noticed that the walls are a different color than the fixtures in the kitchen. When you create text and dimensions, covered in Chapters 13, 14, and 15, you almost always use a color that stands out from the main model that you're drawing. You can also create objects with varying line widths, called lineweights. This use of color, linetype, and lineweight helps to organize your drawings, making them easier to understand.

Most often, you assign color, linetype, and lineweight to a layer. A layer is simply an organizational tool that lets you organize the display of objects in your drawing. Every object must be on a layer, and every layer must have a color, a linetype, and a lineweight. You define layers to meet your drawing needs. Layers, colors, linetypes, and lineweights are called object properties. You can easily change any object's properties. This chapter explains how to create and change these object properties to organize your drawing. ...