Layers

Named sets of your own markup that you can show, hide and lock, independently of each other.

Why you would use it

A drawing ends up carrying several conversations at once — your measurements, somebody else's comments, one trade over another, fingering over dynamics. Layers let you look at one of them at a time without losing the rest.

For example

What to do

1. Open the Layers tab and make a layer.
2. Pick it, so what you draw next goes on it — or select what’s already there and use the arrow on its row.
3. Use the eye to show or hide it, and the padlock to stop it being picked up.

Going further

Hiding is about looking, never about the job: a hidden item stays in the register, stays in its take-off group and keeps counting towards every total — the flag that leaves work out of a bill is “measured but not recorded”, which belongs to a measurement rather than to a layer. The status bar says when anything is hidden, and the export asks whether to leave those items out of the file. Deleting a layer never deletes what’s on it: the markup goes back to being on no layer, and the message says how much.

If you already use another program

In a CAD program: The layer manager: switch layers on and off, and lock them. Here a layer holds markup, and a padlock stops it being moved.

In a building-model program: Visibility and graphics, or worksets: what’s shown, and what may be edited.

In a PDF markup program: The Layers panel: the drawing’s own layers can be shown or hidden here without changing a quantity.