DXF layer inventory

What this tells you

A layer inventory is the first thing worth knowing about a drawing set you did not draw. Before any quantity can be trusted, someone has to answer a plain question: is the work on the layers it is supposed to be on?

The count is the useful part. A partition layer with four objects in a fit-out is not a partition layer — it is four stray lines and the real partitions are somewhere else. A layer that appears in the file but was never drawn on tells you the template was inherited and half of it was never used. A layer carrying ten thousand objects is usually a layer someone exploded a block onto.

Why blocks are counted separately

Objects inside a block definition do not appear in the drawing body. A door drawn once as a block and inserted forty times is one set of objects in the definition and forty insertions in the plan. Counting those together would inflate every number, so they are reported in their own column.

This matters more than it sounds. It is the single most common reason a naive count of a drawing comes back far too low: the things you wanted to count were never loose objects in the first place.

Off, frozen and undeclared

A layer can be switched off or frozen and still carry work. Both states are marked here, because a quantity taken from a drawing without checking them is a quantity that quietly ignored whatever was hidden.

Undeclared means something is drawn on a layer that the file never formally defines. It is legal, it happens when drawings are merged from different sources, and it is worth looking at.

ASCII DXF only

DXF comes in two forms. This reads the ASCII one, which is what AutoCAD produces by default and what almost everything else can write. Binary DXF is detected and refused rather than read wrongly.

DWG is a different, proprietary format and cannot be read here at all. Any CAD application that opens it can save a copy as DXF.