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Working with Layers in MacDraft 7

Layers are perfect for creating your drawings in controlled sections. You can show or hide different layers at different times and work at different scales. For example, lets say you have created a floor plan with multiple layers. You can hide particular layers so you can send off the electrical schematic to your electrician or show the floor plan and décor to send to your interior designer. Each layer will display its intended scale too meaning your document will be set up perfectly for those it is intended for.

What We Will Learn
In this tutorial we will be leaning how to use layers using the following skills:

Step 1 - Overview of the Layers Panel
Open the Elevation Layers.md70 file provided. The Layers panel is the second tab on the right panel, select it to bring up the layers panel. When you open a new blank document for the first time, the first layer by default, will be named "Layer-1".

MacDraft Icon

Step 3 - Renaming a layer
There are 2 ways to rename a Layer in MacDraft 7. Firstly you can select the layer and double click the Layer name, alternatively you can click on the Options (gear) symbol to display a popup in the bottom right and choose Rename Layer. Do this and rename Layer-4 to Dimensions. Press the Enter/Return key on the keyboard to place the text.

Step 4 - Changing the scale of a single layer
Scale is a fundamental feature of MacDraft. It allows you to show anything from a house elevation to a micro chip with true dimensions on the same page. It also allows us to measure at a different scale, the drawing we have here was originally created at 1:50 scale but has been added to a 1:1 document. We can still measure at 1:50 by doing the following.

Step 5 - Layer visibility
Layers can be visible, hidden or ghosted. This allows you to show or hide particular aspects of the drawing. You may have noticed that the Internal layer is currently hidden. Click on the blank square to the left of the layer name (where the eye icon should be) to make it visible.

MacDraft Icon

This will make the internal layer visible and show dashed lines on the document.

MacDraft Icon

Step 6 - Merge layers
There is also the option to merge layers in MacDraft. It’s a great tool for bringing together multiple layers of data to work on at the same time. This tool can only be used when selecting layers of the same scale.

Step 7 - Layer Selection tool
The layer selection tool is found next to the Options (Gear) symbol in the Layers panel. This tool allows you to select any object in the document regardless of if you’re on that layer or not and it will then make the layer it is on active.

Step 8 - Moving/Dragging layers
The position of the layers in the Layers panel is important as it determines which of the objects are positioned above the others. The lower the layer is down the list the higher its content will be in the drawing. You can move the layers position simply by dragging it up and down in the list.

Advanced Step (MacDraft Pro users only) - Moving an object from one layer to another
MacDraft Pro allows you to select an object drawn on one layer and move it to another. In the previous step we realised that the small wooden extension on the drawing was on the template layer, this is of course incorrect. Lets move it to Layer-2 where it belongs with the rest of the drawing.

Summary
With this tutorial you should now be familiar with the Layers panel and how to qork with all of the key Layers features and options. Experiment with the skills you have learnt to create more complex drawings and work faster and more efficiently with your documents. Note: The only other difference between MacDraft PE and MacDraft Pro 7 regarding Layers is that you can only have a maximum of 5 layers in MacDraft PE.

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