Expert: Bill DeShawn - 3/21/2007

Question
i am adding my design to an already made drawing.
i want to xref the original drawing and work my design on top of it, but i want the xref to look gray and dark and obviously less important than my design, so my design can outstand from the background xref.
i can not change the colors of the layers of the original drawing. i can not do anything to the original drawing, i can only view it, copy it, paste it, block it, or xret it.
but in my model space, i still want to see it all gray and uneditable.
please let me know how to do that.

Answer
The Layer manager can change the colors of the layers of the reference attached to your drawing, but will not change the colors of the layers in the drawing that is referenced.  You can also use the -layer command to change the xref layers.  For example if you have an ALONSODIMS layer in the XREF, then in a menu macro you can get the color changed with:
^C^C-LAYER;COLOR;8;*|ALONSODIMS;
Or in a script:
-layer
c
8
*|alonsodims

But really, if you're only going to do this exercise once,then the Layer Properties Manager is probably the way to go.

If you want ALL the layers to go to color 8, then:
-layer
c
8
*|*

The vertical character (|) is the pipe sign above the backslash on the keyboard and is the easy way to identify XREF layers.

Keep in touch
bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn