ACAD 2005 - blocks and their layers

[SeanSweeney]

I often receive drawings from our architects full of blocks on lots of layers. These are then Xrefed into my drawing. When I use express tools to snow flake freeze them it usually says layer 0 frozen and they are still there.

It is possible to go into layer manager and freeze the layer directly, but what are they doing to make this happen. Incidently we create the same problems in our own drawings so it's a common problem.

I presume it is to do with which layer is on and by layer etc.

Can you help. Thanks.

 

[xgrigorix]

In theory all geometry for blocks & the block itself should be created on the 0 layer. By doing this, it allows the block to take on the properties of whatever layer is it put on when inserted into the file. It sounds like things within the blocks are on different layers, & that the blocks were created on a layer other than 0. If you can get people to conform to this, then you'll be able to elimate a few of these problems.

 

[ohiocad]

What is sounds like to me, when you xref the architects drawing into yours, the xref comes in basically as a block, and inserts on what layer you have current (like 0). If you click on an item in the xref with the pick-freeze command, then all it is doing is selecting the layer that the block is inserted on, not the layers of the individual items in the xref, as they are nested in the block. Only way that I know of is to go into the layer manager and freeze the items individually by layer.

Unless things have changed in the newer releases of Acad, (we're still on 2000) I don't know of a way to do it. There may be lisp routines that you can find online that will let you select individual items within a block to freeze layers, but I don't recall ever having seen one.