Layer extension

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,
I know it may sound like a silly question, but what is the goal of the layer "extension"?

[vfrontiers]

Just a guess... but if someone typed in a "." it will change to an extension. Maybe they were not realizing they were "extending" layer names?

[Barry Kelly]

In my experience - yes.
We used to have "." in our layer names when we first started (V6.5).
Somewhere along the way (might have been 8.1) the part of the layer name after the "." became the layer extension.
We ended up renaming them all to avoid the problem.
Barry.

[Erika Epstein]

Barry, the '.' serving to define what comes after it as the extension has been present since at least 5.

[Barry Kelly]

Erika wrote:
Barry, the '.' serving to define what comes after it as the extension has been present since at least 5.

We have only been using since 6.5 but I don't have it installed any more.
But we definitely had layers with "." in them and no layer extensions.
One was "Furn. & Equip. (2D & 3D)" and another "Gable ends and ext. det."
It wasn't until 7 or 8.1 (can't remember) that these automatically became extensions.

But now the "." is definitely an extension separator.
You can have more "." in the extension but I don't think I would want to try this.

Barry.

[Anonymous]

Barry wrote:
We have only been using since 6.5 but I don't have it installed any more.
But we definitely had layers with "." in them and no layer extensions.
One was "Furn. & Equip. (2D & 3D)" and another "Gable ends and ext. det."
It wasn't until 7 or 8.1 (can't remember) that these automatically became extensions.

But now the "." is definitely an extension separator.

The "." has always been the extension separator (since named layers were introduced with v4.0). It appears from your experience that there was an exception when the dot was followed by a space character but that this is no longer the case.

[Anonymous]

Maybe it is only southern hemisphere versions, but I have the same recollection as Barry - we used to have layers called "Services: d.p.s" (for rainwater downpipes) which in a certain version (not sure which) changed to having an extension.