Paul Smith wrote:
Dear All
Could someone please tell me what for are layers intended? I have never used such a thing, and that is why it intrigues me.
Layers are intended for a separation of "layers" of a particular piece of work. A couple examples are as follows.
In Illustration you may want to have different layers for things such as the background, the foreground, and layers for any particular items which are logically not together (such as if you have individual people in the illustration you could do a layer for each person).
In web design you may have layers for each "section" of a page. You may have a background layer, a header layer, a footer layer, and a content layer.
If you were to make maps you may do a base layer for the land, another layer for rivers, another layer for roads, another layer for train tracks, and other layers for other topographical features.
Not to confuse things more, but you can also have sub-layers as well. Continuing the map example. You may have a parent layer for roads which contains two sub-layers, one for regular roads and the other for highways. The benefit to this work flow would be that you can then easily hide/lock both of those sub-layers by hiding/locking the parent layer.
For a little more information on it you can reference:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/ch05s07.html
Hope that helps, -Josh