Layer aliases

Does AutoCAD 2008 allow a user to assign aliases to layer names? I can't see anything in the help files so presumably it doesn't - but maybe I'm just looking for the wrong thing. If it doesn;t exist I think this would be a great feature.

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Why not just name them what you want them to be?

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Ah, the life of the sole practitioner is a happy one. Unfortunately, there's a whole department here dedicated to the single-minded pursuit of other people's misery through the ruthless imposition of so-called 'standards'. Even asking them why is enough to score a black mark against your name. Nice health care plan, though.

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It has its moments for sure, but there is the big sack of worry too.
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I guess it was a silly question. Forgive me.
From the command line you can define lisp variables that will only persist as long as the drawing session. I.E., :
(setq a "1-above")
will save "1-above" in the variable "a".
Typing "!a" at any prompt will relay "1-above" to the command in progress, so you could use the command line version of the layer command like this:
layer>>s>>!a
to set the current layer to "1-above".
If you want to do this over and over, a simple lisp routine that does a big list of alias definitions would allow you to do the above in many drawing sessions, presuming that the naming conventions are fairly rigorous....which it sounds like they might be ; )

Take a look at LAYTRANS.
You can use it to change some or all of the layer names in a drawing from a standard to your preference. This way, you can just enter "wall" instead of "1-a-wall-exg" and not have to remember any command syntax changes.
Renaming layers back to their approved names is just as easy - just don't forget to do it.
-Bill
strawberry wrote:
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Thanks Bill, I'll take a closer look at that.