CADDManager on August 24th, 2009

Layers are the workhorse of CAD. They have been around forever and they can still be one of the main sources of your headaches. Combine that with the pen table you use and you have the one-two punch of CAD.  All of us live here – every day. The one-two punch can help you knock out your work, or it can knock you out trying to get the work done.

If any area of your CAD Standard needs to be rock solid – this is it.

The combination of layer and weights is the foundation of everything you do in CAD. It forms the bedrock of all that you do. It provides for the unification of all the look and feel issues that come up in a set of files. What should it look like?  Go to the layer list to see what layer and weight it should have. It is all defined in your list.

The crucial nature of the layer names and weights impact every corner of your files and models.  There is not one piece of data that you add to your files that does not have to have a layer and a weight defined.  That means that every entity must be right – and it is so easy to get it wrong.

Bad Layers and weights have plagued CAD since day one.  Why can’t we get it right?  Now we have higher end tools that move away from the need to think of layers and weights on an individual object, but there are still  ways to have troubles getting your output to look the way you want.

So where do you go with your CAD Standard on this topic?  You take as much time to get it right, define it, refine it and press toward compliance as you can.  This is one of the most basic areas of the whole process. This is the one that everyone expects you to get right.  Get this one right and people may not even notice, but get it wrong and everyone is impacted.

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