Working with Layers
Organize a drawing with layers — colour, linetype and lineweight by layer, and the off, frozen and locked states that decide what you can still reach.
Layers are how a drawing is organized, and in Pingendum 2D they are also how it looks: a curve's colour, linetype and lineweight all come from its layer unless you override them on the object itself (Reading Your Sketch).
That makes layers worth setting up early. Putting centrelines, hidden detail and outline on their own layers is what lets you restyle, hide or exclude a whole class of geometry in one click instead of selecting it all again.
Prerequisites
Before you begin, ensure that:
- You've completed Drawing Basic Shapes and have some geometry to organize.
The Layers Panel
Open the sidebar with View → Panels (Ctrl+1) and pick the Layers tab.
At the top: a Search layers box that filters the list by name as you type, and three buttons — New, Delete and Set Current.
Below them, one row per layer. Each row carries, left to right:
| Element | What it does |
|---|---|
| Eye | Turns the layer's visibility on or off |
| Current mark | Shows which layer new geometry will land on |
| Colour swatch | The layer's colour; its tooltip gives the hex value and the colour's name |
| Name | Shortened to fit; the full name is in the tooltip |
| Badges | Small marks for locked, frozen and excluded from print/PDF |
| ⋯ menu | Everything else this layer can do |
The Current Layer
New geometry is created on the current layer. That's the whole of the rule, and it's the one thing to set before drawing rather than after.
Select a layer and click Set Current, or use Set Current in its ⋯ menu.
A frozen layer can't be made current — thaw it first, and the button's tooltip says so.
Layer Properties
Everything below is on each row's ⋯ menu.
- Colour — a submenu of named colours, plus Custom… for the system colour picker.
- Linetype — the drawing's linetype catalogue. A drawing may carry a linetype this build doesn't know; it's listed but not selectable, and says so.
- Lineweight — the ISO 128 weight ladder, plus Default for the drawing's hairline.
- Rename… — with one exception, below.
Changing a layer's colour restyles every object on it that hasn't been given a colour of its own. That is the fast way to make a whole class of geometry read differently.
Off, Frozen and Locked
These three are the reason layers are more than a colour scheme, and they are genuinely different from one another. All three are toggles on the ⋯ menu.
| State | Drawn? | Found by Select All or a selection box? | Editable? | Snappable? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visible off | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Frozen | No | No | No | No |
| Locked | Yes, faded | Yes | No | Yes |
Visibility off hides a layer and nothing more. Its geometry is still in the drawing, still counts toward the view extents, and Ctrl+A still selects it. Use it to get something out of the way for a moment.
Frozen takes the layer out of the working set entirely — invisible, unreachable by any selection, and excluded from evaluation. Use it for geometry you want the drawing to stop spending time on. The current layer can't be frozen.
Locked keeps a layer visible and pickable but refuses every edit, and fades its colour halfway toward the canvas so it reads as quiet reference. Crucially, locked geometry is still snappable — which is exactly what you want from a reference layer you're drawing against.
Try to edit something on a locked or frozen layer and Pingendum names the layer rather than failing silently:
Layer "Walls" is locked. Unlock it in the Layers panel to edit what is on it.
A mixed selection does the part it's allowed to and reports the rest.
Include in Print/PDF
A fourth toggle, separate from visibility: Include in print/PDF. Turn it off and the layer stays on screen but is absent from the plotted sheet — the standard way to keep construction and setup geometry visible while you work without it reaching the paper. See Plotting and Printing.
Adding and Deleting Layers
New adds a layer, named Layer 1, Layer 2 and so on, starting cyan. Rename it from the ⋯ menu.
Delete removes the selected layer — with two guards:
-
You can't delete the current layer. Make another layer current first.
-
If the layer has objects on it, Pingendum asks where they should go rather than deleting them with it:
Layer "Detail" has 14 object(s) on it. Move them to:
Pick a destination layer and the objects are reassigned. Cancel and nothing changes.
Layer 0 and CONSTRUCTION
Two layers are special.
Layer 0 is the base layer every drawing has. It cannot be deleted or renamed, but it can be restyled freely — so if you dislike its cyan default, change it rather than working around it. Everything you draw lands here until you set another layer current.
CONSTRUCTION is where construction geometry belongs, and it's the layer name DXF export writes construction geometry to — so a receiving CAD system can switch it off in one click.
Read-Only Drawings
A drawing written by a newer version of Pingendum opens read-only, and its layers can't be changed. The panel's buttons are disabled and say why:
This drawing is read-only, so its layers cannot be changed.
You can still look at every layer, and still export and plot the drawing.
Next Steps
You now know how to:
- Set the current layer, and predict where new geometry lands
- Give a layer a colour, linetype and lineweight, and restyle everything on it at once
- Tell off, frozen and locked apart, and pick the right one
- Keep a layer on screen but off the paper
- Delete a layer without losing what was on it
- Recognize the two layers that behave differently from the rest
With the drawing organized, the remaining chapters cover getting it out of Pingendum.
Snapping While You Draw
Understand what a drawing click snaps to — existing endpoints and centres, points along a curve, the origin axes, and the grid — and which one wins when several are in range.
Exchanging Drawings as DXF
Bring geometry in from another CAD system and send it back out — units, gap welding, layer mapping, and what each DXF revision can and cannot carry.