Getting Rid of Unwanted Layers

Every now and then, unwanted layers make their way into our drawings, and much worse, our templates. Here are some tools you can use to clean these layers from your files.

Hopefully, you are familiar with the Purge command. It is great for getting rid of unused content in your drawings. Often times, there are items that will not purge. A few releases ago, the Purge dialog in AutoCAD transformed into a tool we can use to identify why certain items will not purge.

Items that cannot be purged will not be listed among the purgeable items in the Purge dialog. But there is a button that will list Non-Purgeable Items.

Click on Find Non-Purgeable Items to display items that cannot be purged and select the item on the list that needs purging. In the example above, it is a layer that crept its way in through binding an XREF. When you select the item, the dialog will display information about this item to help you identify where it is coming from. From this example, we can glean the item is being used in four instances. Also, the layer is being used in three objects and one block definition. We can BEDIT the block definition and use QUICKSELECT to select all items in that block that use that layer name and move them to layer 0, even if the items are embedded in a visibility state.

After moving these items to layer 0, we can now purge the layer out of the drawing.

 

Sometimes purging layers are not so easy, especially when there is more than one layer created for the same purpose.

In this case, we could select the unwanted layer and use the Merge Layer tool to dump the contents of the unwanted layer into another layer, then delete the unwanted layer.

1. First, select the unwanted layer in the Layer Properties Manager, right-click, and click Merge Selected Layer(s) to…
2. When the Merge to Layer dialog opens, find the layer on the list you want to merge with and click OK.
3. A warning appears. Click YES to continue.
   

The unwanted layer is gone and the objects it hosted are now on the correct layer.

 

Another way to purge layers out of the drawing is to use the -LAYDEL command, available on the expanded Layers panel on the Home Tab.. This will not only delete the layer but delete all the objects in that layer. This tool should be used with caution!

Keeping our drawings free from non-standard items is important when we share our files with others because it reflects the quality and aesthetics of our work. These are a few tools available in AutoCAD that assist us in maintaining that standard.