AutoCAD® 2011 & AutoCAD LT® 2011 Bible

Chapter 11. Organizing Drawings with Layers and Object Properties

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Organizing your drawing

• Working with layers

• Changing object color, linetype, lineweight, and transparency

• Working with linetype scales

• Importing layers and linetypes from other drawings

• Matching properties

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. Finally, you can set the transparency of objects. This use of color, linetype, lineweight, and transparency helps to organize your drawings, making them easier to understand.

Most often, you assign color, linetype, lineweight, and transparency 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, ...