nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Bluebeam Community

Build connections with Bluebeamers around the world, discover what’s new, and make your voice heard.

Save Default PDF Layer Settings

A Arevalo

Feature Idea: Save Default PDF Layer Settings

It would be useful to have a way to save default layer settings within a PDF.

For example:

Save layers as expanded or collapsed
Save specific layers as ON or OFF
Set a default layer configuration for the file

This would be especially useful for teams sharing PDFs. The author could control which layers are visible by default, so when someone else opens the file, they see the intended view without having to manually adjust the layers.

A simple “Save Layer State” or “Set as Default” option would make working with layered PDFs much more efficient.

Find more posts tagged with

Active

Drawing Management

Layers

Status: Active

Comments

cprevedel

Agreed! Because of this, I manually copy my template when making a new document, as my layer configurations do not transfer if I use the template to create a new document.

Josh Gebelein

Layers are virtually useless if you can't save the layer state between users or when printing. Because of that I rarely use them.

David Cutler

Unless I'm misunderstanding your suggestion @A Arevalo this feature is already available - or at least some of the functionality.

Simply establish the layer conditions that you desire and then save that configuration as the "Default" configuration. I don't have an example handy to check display configuration in the layer tree view, but I in my experience if a layer is turned off in the Default configuration you won't see it when the PDF is opened.

You may want to be careful with what layers that you turn off by default! I received a drawing package once that had a couple of drainage layers turned off in the Default configuration. I was submitting RFI's asking for information on structures that I couldn't see because the Default configuration distributed by the client had those layers turned off - by mistake. Took a few hours of digging through details to figure that one out.

Hope this helps! 😎

Vince French

If you use a template then any nested layer details are lost. So, instead of using a template, use a standard file with all of the layers all ready created, your on-off configurations already saved. This can have been created from something that you have already worked on then inserting a blank sheet and deleting all of the others. Open up the clean sheet then add your other information. You can then delete the first sheet if you want to.

Vince French

Spot on @David Cutler !

A Arevalo

That did help on the ON and OFF layers. I have around 60 layers and having all those fully expanded with its sublayers can be annoying having to go thru all of them every time the PDF gets open.

Thank you

David Cutler

@Vince French is sharing a very powerful tip here @A Arevalo. I use a coversheet on all of my takeoffs that establishes my custom columns for my tools. Adding the layer structure as he suggest just adds to the value of that cover sheet.

Glad the first suggestion helped! 😎

cprevedel

I mostly use them as a way to group related markups by a common property that the Markups List (my beloved) can search for and filter on. ESPECIALLY after I realized that toolbox tools can be set to a specific layer.