Using Layers to Organize Your Drawing - AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011: No Experience Required - page 248

by placing the cursor between the columns and dragging left or right. Look at
the layer 0 row in the list and notice the square and the word white in the Color
column. The square is black (or white if you have a black background for your
drawing area), but the name of the color is white whether the square is black
or white. Continuous is in the Linetype column. This tells you that layer 0 has
been assigned the color White (meaning black or white) and the Continuous
linetype by default.
NOTE If you set up your drawing area so that the background is white,
autoCaD automatically changes the color assigned to white in the Layer List
box to black, so lines that would ordinarily appear as white on a black back-
ground will appear as black on the white background. When you then switch
to a black background, the black lines change to white lines. this allows the
lines to be visible regardless of the background color, and autoCaD doesn't
have to assign a new color to a layer that has been assigned the White set-
ting when you switch background colors.
The five columns to the left of the Color column are Status, Name, On, Freeze,
and Lock. They each have icons or text in the layer 0 row. These columns represent
some of the status modes — or states — of the layer, and they control whether
objects on a layer are visible, whether they can be changed, or on which layer new
objects are created. I'll discuss the visibility and status of layers later in this chapter,
and I'll discuss the columns to the right of the Linetype column — Lineweight,
Plot Style, Plot, and Description — in Chapter 15, “Printing an AutoCAD Drawing.”
Don't worry about them right now.
Creating new Layers and Assigning Colors
Let's create a few new layers, name them, and assign them colors:
1. In the toolbar at the top of the Layer Properties Manager, click the
New Layer icon. A new layer named Layer1 appears in the list. The
layer's name is highlighted, which means you can rename it by enter-
ing another name now.
2. Enter A-WALL ↵ . Layer1 changes to A-WALL. The row for the A-WALL
layer should still be highlighted (see Figure 6.7).
3. To open the Select Color dialog box, click the word “white” in the
Color column for the A-WALL row (see Figure 6.8). Notice the three
tabs at the top — Index Color, True Color, and Color Books. Each has
a different selection of colors available to AutoCAD.