Discovered a cheat code for layer matching in AutoCAD by accident

I was working on a huge office building plan in Houston last Tuesday and my hatch patterns were all out of whack. Tried purging and auditing like usual but nothing fixed the weird layer overlap on floor 4. Out of frustration I hit "select similar" on one line and then "._layiso" to isolate it and boom the whole drawing cleaned up in 30 seconds. My boss walked by and asked how I fixed it so fast and I just shrugged. Has anyone else stumbled on a random command combo that saved hours of fiddling?

2 comments

2 Comments

thead4414d ago

Hold on, I see this a little differently. Hitting select similar and then layiso is basically just turning off everything else, not actually fixing the layer mismatch. You could do the same thing with a quick layer freeze. That trick might work in a pinch, but if your hatch patterns are that messed up again, you're just covering up the real problem instead of cleaning your layer properties.

river_hart1814d ago

Wait, @thead44, are we sure turning off layers is the same thing here though? I mean, yeah layiso just isolates the layer so you cant see the mess, but if the hatch patterns are overlapping wrong on the same layer, isolating it might actually let you see where the real problem is without all the other noise. I get that it's not a permanent fix for bad layer properties, but sometimes you just need to find the problem area fast and then go back and fix it right. Maybe it's just me but I've done stuff like that on accident and it showed me exactly which lines were on the wrong layer way quicker than digging through the properties panel.