Layer aliases

Does AutoCAD 2008 allow a user to assign aliases to layer names? I
can't see anything in the help files so presumably it doesn't - but
maybe I'm just looking for the wrong thing. If it doesn;t exist I
think this would be a great feature.

 

Why not just name them what you want them to be?

 

Ah, the life of the sole practitioner is a happy one. Unfortunately,
there's a whole department here dedicated to the single-minded pursuit
of other people's misery through the ruthless imposition of so-called
'standards'. Even asking them why is enough to score a black mark
against your name. Nice health care plan, though.

 

It has its moments for sure, but there is the big sack of worry too.

I guess it was a silly question. Forgive me.

From the command line you can define lisp variables that will only persist
as long as the drawing session. I.E., :

(setq a "1-above")

will save "1-above" in the variable "a".

Typing "!a" at any prompt will relay "1-above" to the command in progress,
so you could use the command line version of the layer command like this:

layer>>s>>!a

to set the current layer to "1-above".

If you want to do this over and over, a simple lisp routine that does a big
list of alias definitions would allow you to do the above in many drawing
sessions, presuming that the naming conventions are fairly rigorous....which
it sounds like they might be ; )

 

Take a look at LAYTRANS.

You can use it to change some or all of the layer names in a drawing
from a standard to your preference. This way, you can just enter "wall"
instead of "1-a-wall-exg" and not have to remember any command syntax
changes.

Renaming layers back to their approved names is just as easy - just
don't forget to do it.

-Bill

 

Thanks Bill, I'll take a closer look at that.