What is Current Layer and Current Style in CAD and how to switch between them?

Layer is an important concept in CAD and to better understand layer and the related concepts such as current layer, please refer to the post basics about layer.

The CAD program has not only current layer, but also current color, current linetype, current text style, current dimension style, current table style, etc. This post is going to explore more about Current in CAD. By default, newly-created graphics use the current format or style, for example, newly-created graphics will be put on the current layer, newly-created text will use the current text style and newly-created dimension will use the current dimension style.

To make whatever we create such as color, linetype, text, dimension, etc applicable for the current layer and format, we need to set the current properties and styles properly. There are two major ways to do this: do it in the dialog box or do it in the drop-down list of the toolbar or Command Panel.

About layer

Switch to the current layer in the Layer dialog box

Open the Layer Properties Manager, select the layer and click the “Set Current” button, as shown in the following picture,

2. Switch to the current layer in the toolbar or Command Panel

The Layer style control, as shown in the following picture, has three functions:

(1) Specifies which layer the selected objects are on, if users have selected objects from multiple layers, the Layer style control would display empty, as shown in the following picture,

(2) After selecting certain objects, specify a layer in the Layer style control to move the objects to that layer.

Many people have asked how to move objects or graphics to other layers, that’s one way to do so.

(3) If you haven’t selected any objects, then the layer displayed in the Layer style control is the current layer, and we can make other layers current by selecting them, as shown in the following picture,

A small tip for finding the layer that you need is to enter the first or two characters of the layer name to help you to locate it from hundreds or thousands of layers.

3. How to set the current layer to that of selected object

If there are many layers in the drawing and it is almost impossible to remember which layer to put the object, in this case, we can easily switch to that layer by selecting object if there are already other objects on that layer. The command to do this is called LAYMCUR, as shown in the following picture,

4. Use plugin or professional software to switch to the current layer

Although the CAD system provides many ways to do it, manually switching to the current layer can be inconvenient, there are some plugins or professional software that will enable us to automatically switch to the specified layer.

GstarCAD provides Autolayer function, as shown in the following pictures:

About other properties and styles

Normally, properties such as color, linetype and lineweight are set to ByLayer, if we want to change them, just do this in the Properties command panel, as shown in the following picture,

Or do this in respective dialog box, as shown in the following pictures,

For other properties such as text style, dimension style and tablestyle whose locations vary from one version to another, we can access these commands by entering textstyle, d and tablestyle and then press Enter, as shown in the following picture,