The Javelin Technologies Blog

DWG/DXF files are still widely used by designers and engineers nowadays.

Layers are very useful in these 2D drawings to distinguish different types of entities.

In SW 2D drawings, there is “layer” tool where you can manually setup different layers, but they are rather time consuming.

When exporting the drawing to DWG/DXF in SW, you can setup layer mapping, so your DWG/DXF files will have correct layers and corresponding colors.

1. When the file type is switched to DWG/DXF, click on “Options” button.  In the new window, click on the “enable” to activate the mapping tool.  If you already have the mapping file, you can browse for it.

2. Once the setup is done, click on “save”, and then the mapping tool window pops up.  If you are starting from scratch, the mapping content is blank.  On the left column, “define layers”, this is where you input the layer names you want to show up in DWG/DXF files.  Assign colors and line styles for them as well.  In the “map entities” column, this is the place to map the “define layers” items to SW layers.  For the colors and line styles, I put “by layer”.  In the “entity” selections, “geometry”, “dimensions”, “centerline”, etc are the different entities in SW.  In the third column, you can map to different colors.

3. In the DWG file, all entities are assigned to correct layers.