CAD drawing layers

CAD drawing layers are layers contained in the source CAD drawing. When you add CAD data to ArcMap, the initial visibility settings are determined by the layer states that were defined by the CAD application at the time the CAD file was saved. You can override these visibility settings from the Drawing Layers tab in the Layer Properties dialog box.

Each CAD feature layer maintains its own collection of visibility settings for every drawing layer in the CAD file. As a result, you can manage visibility for the same drawing layer in each feature layer independently. If you save the map, your changes are saved in the current map and do not affect the display of drawing layers in other maps.

Layer state in the CAD drawing	Initial state in ArcGIS
On	Visible
Off	Not visible
Frozen	Not visible
Locked	Visible