The templates that create environments and the symbols that are used in those environments have a formally defined structure of layers which contain specific types of graphical information. You can imagine each layer as being similar to the transparent gels used by animators to construct cartoons. For example, the background of a scene goes on one gel, major characters have a gel each, incidental elements go on another layer and the foreground scenery goes on another. Put all the gels together and you have a complete scene. It is exactly the same with layers; different elements of all the possible views of products (e.g. front graphics, rear graphics, outlines, simple text representations etc) are separated out onto individual layers and by selectively displaying these layers all of the different views can be produced.
Since the environments use many dozens of layers it
would be tedious to manually turn each layer on or off to construct the
desired view. Fortunately the Tools toolbar allows you to access preset
views by simultaneously changing the display status of many layers at
a time. In
the Menu bar, the Tools | View sub-menu duplicates these buttons and also
lets you selectively toggle particular layers on and off.
It is important to note that this toolbar is only active when you're working on documents that are based on one of the preset templates. In addition, certain commands in this toolbar are specific to certain of the environments (for example, the Side View button is only active in the Rack Layout environment since none of the others offer a side view of the products they use.)
Use the Layers Dropdown box the choose the layer a selection
should be placed on, or to define the layer on which new objects will
be placed.
Layers can be created, edited and deleted in the Layers tab of the Document Properties dialog.
