After working on a project involving dwgs and layers, I have a couple of enhancement requests for layers

Redesign layer manager window to be resizable, sortable

I've seen this request pop up in some of the forum posts.  I've run into this problem a couple of times where the name of the layer had to be really long and since the box isn't resizeable, I had repeatedly expand the column width to see the full name and then shrink it to see the other settings for the layer like the color.

There have been other times where I created a bunch of layers and then needed to add another one that was similar in name to the layer first created in the list.  You can't sort the list so if you want layers to be grouped together in the list, you have to either rename the layers in the right order or delete/recreate the layers in the right order.

Make it easier to set the component line font

When a user exports a drawing as a dwg, they want to have all of the entities assigned to the right layers to make editing of the dwg easier.  Right now to get entities of the parts/assemblies to be assigned to a layer, you have to either assign the component line font or play around with the Custom Map from SolidWorks to DXF/DWG settings.  With the component line font, you have to pick each component from either the drawing view or the drawing view's tree when it's difficult to select the component from the view.  This is very tedious especially if you're dealing with a very large assembly where various components need to be assigned to different layers.  Setting the component font takes a couple of clicks from selecting the component, to unchecking the document defaults and then setting the layer.  Even when setting the layer, the line styles don't default to the line style for the layer.  If you want to change the line style of the component, you have to also set that in the component font dialog.

With the custom map, I've gotten the right settings not without going through a bunch of test dwg exports till I got everything the way I wanted it to be.  Even with this, I ran into a problem with not being able to set the layer for visible sketches from parts/assemblies in the drawing. 

It would be nice to be able to set the layer for a component at the part level and/or assembly level the way display states work for assemblies.  I have tried to use the drawing option Detailing>Use model color to try to get around the issue of setting the component line font, but in the dwg export, all of the entities are set to the 0 layer with the colors and line styles overridden from the layer defaults.  This becomes a laborious task to try to set all of the entities to the right layer after the export. 

In the end, my colleague had to write up a macro to set the component line font for the components in the drawing.

Line Style/ Line Color

I've always thought it was confusing to know whether the color/style of a line is coming from the layer settings, overridden or from system settings.  I usually run into this when I do an import of a dwg to try to create the sheet format and I change the settings for the layer but the line doesn't change.  Then I turn on the line format toolbar and start playing with those settings.  I've always seen this as part of a challenge when teaching the templates lesson for the Drawings class to stop myself from confusing the students along with all of the other settings/options with templates.

Indicator that you are adding annotations to a hidden layer

I've gotten a call from time to time where a user says they're adding an annotation/balloon but they can't see it.  Most of the time, it's because their active layer is set to a hidden layer.  This can happen if the template was saved with the hidden layer set to active.  I always warn students to make sure the active layer is set to the visible layer before the template is saved.  Another way this can happen is in adding a new layer, the active layer becomes the last layer created.  It doesn't appear you can change this in the layer manager window.  You have to exit out of it and make sure it's changed in the drop down for layers.  This would be another enhancement to the layer manager dialog to have this option.  In a test, I saw that when you add a sketch entity when a hidden layer is active, SolidWorks gives a warning message but it doesn't do the same when adding annnotations.

Thanks,

Annie