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Layers
What are layers? Everything in your document has a stacking order - that is new items are placed on top
of older items on the page, in exactly the same way as if you were adding bits of paper onto your
desktop. You can click to select and move any object, but with more complex documents that have
dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands of items, your work area can be become cluttered and difficult to
organize. You might want to work on items hidden by others on top.
Layers are a useful way of organizing more complex pages or drawings that contain many separate parts.
Using layers you can group a collection of items together and then turn the whole collection on or off
(make it visible or hidden) in one easy operation. You can think of a layer like a transparent plastic folder
holding a stack of separate papers. By opening the folder you can access its contents, and re-arrange the
contents. But your desk may have a stack of such folders, and just as you can also re-arrange the
folders, you can similarly re-arrange the layers.
So layers are groups of items. Layers can be made invisible, to hide parts of your document, which
makes your work areas less cluttered and easier to manage. You can give layers names, and you can
easily create new layers or delete them. And just as you can click the small arrow icon to open a page
and view its contents (the layers on the page), you can do the same to each layer to view the contents of
that layer.
When you select any object, the layer it's on is shown on the status line at the bottom of the window.
The steps within a presentation document are actually just different layers within the document.
Presentation layers, however, are named presentation steps. You are given the option to convert layers
into presentation steps when you convert a web document into a presentation. To turn a layer into a
presentation step, click the Presentation layer checkbox in the Web transition tab of the Layer
Properties
dialog. The layer is renamed 'presentation step N', which retains the layer stacking order.
The Current Layer
When you create any new object on the page, it's placed in one of the layers, called the active layer or
simply the current layer. On a blank document this will either just be called Layer 1 or, in the case of web
documents, it's called MouseOff. The current layer is shown with a selection arrow
.
Important: All new drawn items, shapes, photos, text, and all pasted items, are placed on the current
layer marked with the
symbol.
You can change the current layer simply by clicking on its row in the Page & Layer Gallery
. It's important to understand that you can have a selected object on any layer or even multiple layers,
and these need not be the current layer. The current layer, with the arrow, only indicates where new
items will be placed.
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