How to Remove Undesirable Layers & Styles from Templates

Have you ever really looked at your template and wondered where certain text styles and layers came from? Have you ever wanted to remove this inconsistency from your drawing template? Have you ever wanted to replace text inside old blocks with your standard font but have never had the time to open each block up to do it? There is an overlooked command we can use to quickly take care of these issues called Standards.

To do this, you must create a standards (DWS) file.

1. Create a new file from the acad.dwt template (if using CTBs for plotting) or ACAD -Named Plot Styles.dwt. These templates are empty with only Standard styles and no layers except for the one named 0. If you are configured to pull templates from a shared location and do not see these templates, you can find them here: C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Autodesk\\enu\Template.
2. Save the file to your template folder as .dws. Be sure to change the Files of Type setting to DWS.
3. Open your standard template alongside the DWS file in the same session of CAD.
4. Open the AutoCAD Design Center by typing ADC on the command line.
5. With the DWS being the active file, drag and drop only those text styles you want to exist in your standard template into the drawing window. Do the same for layers, linetypes, dimension styles, table styles, and multi-leader styles.
   
6. Save the DWS file and close.
7. In your template file, type Standards at the command line. Click on the plus button in the dialog to browse to your template folder and select the DWS file.
   
8. Click the Check Standards button. If you have not changed the default settings, the process will stop each time it finds a standard that doesn’t exist in the dws file. It will also find styles or layers that are named the same but have different configurations.
   
9. Choose to either ignore a problem by hitting next or select another style in the Replace With section, then hit Fix.
   
10. When finished, click on close to complete the command. If you open styles, you will see that any style that has been replaced has actually been removed from the drawing.
11. Open the Standards dialog again and remove the standards file.
    

To clean out unwanted layers, use the Layer Translator tool.

1. At the command line, type LAYTRANS.
2. In the Layer Translator dialog, click Load to browse to your DWS file. You will see the layers from the DWS file load up in the right pane of the dialog.
3. Map unwanted layers to good layers by making a selection on the left, then right, and hitting Map. You can ignore the layers on the left side that are good.
4. Save the mappings in your template folder by clicking Save to use again on other files if needed.
5. Click Translate. This will take the objects in layers on the left side and put them in the layers on the right side. It will also purge the layers out of the file.
   

Keeping your template clean and free from non-standard items will keep your team on a path of creating clean, consistent drawings for projects.