AutoCAD Layer Translator

This great tutorial is courtesy of my good friend, nice guy, writer, and top notch AutoCAD Trainer Michael Beall (http://autocadtrainerguy.com/) who is currently doing some AutoCAD training in the African nation of Angola. Michael is sharing some of his great articles from his newsletter and online AutoCAD resource Michael’s Corner with you the Between the Lines readers. Check out Michael’s Corner and if you need an AutoCAD trainer he is a great resource and willing to travel anywhere in the world.

The Layer Translator is one of those many features in AutoCAD that gets little mention if at all but can save you a great deal of time. It has been in AutoCAD for several releases now. Michael wrote a great overview of it’s use.

Let’s say you receive several drawings from the same contractor on a particular project and they use a layer named AR-Wall but your layer standard is A_Walls. AutoCAD’s Layer Translator (located on the CAD Standards toolbar or from ToolsCAD StandardsLayer Translator) may be the solution.

Ideally, you would have a "master" drawing or template which contains your layer list. Using Layer Translator, you can then "map" the other drawing’s layers to your layers as you’ll see in the following procedure.

Instructions to Map Layers of a Drawing to Your Layer Standard

1. Open a drawing for which you would like to map their layer naming to yours. You may want to look at the drawing named "db_samp.dwg" in AutoCAD’s ..\Sample folder.
2. Open the Layer Translator dialog box where you will see the current drawing’s list of layers under the Translate From listing…
3. Click Load, then navigate to the drawing or template containing your company’s standard layer list, then click Open and that layer list shows up under Translate To.
4. Now you basically "connect the dots". Click one layer in the list on the left to Translate From, then you can click one or more layers (using Ctrl to click additional layers) under the Translate To list. After each "pairing", click Map. At that point, the Translate From layer you selected is now removed from the list. The goal of the exercise is to map all the layers from the left to the right. To map all the layers that have the same name in both lists – such as layer 0 and Defpoints – click Map Same.

Sidebar A: If you get "happy fingers" and mistakenly grab the wrong layer from the Translate From list, you will notice after you click Map that the mapped layers are displayed in the Layer Translation Mappings list. Right-click on the layer mistakenly mapped, then click Remove to put it back in the Translate From list.

Sidebar B: If you need to add a layer on the Translate To side to accommodate a layer from the Translate From side, click the New button to open the New Layer dialog box.

1. After translating all the layers, if you will be needing to use the same translation on other drawings you get from the same outside source, click Save to open the Save Layer Mappings dialog box and save a .DWS file.
2. Click Translate to translate the layers.

Instructions to Use a DWS Translation File on Other Drawings

1. Open the drawing from the outside source, then open the Layer Translator.
2. Click Load and change the Files Of Type to Standards (*.dws), then navigate to the location where the DWS file was saved from the previous drawing.
3. Select the DWS file, then click Open and the layers in the Translate From list that have been saved in the DWS file are mapped to the Layer Translation Mappings list. If additional layers remain in the Translate From list, you can map the additional layers and save the new DWS (or overwrite the existing one), or click Translate to complete the procedure.