Color Retain is a specific program written in Visual Basic 6.0. If a user attaches many base drawings in his drawing and sometime changes colors of layers in base drawings and want to update these colors in his drawing. Unfortunately AutoCAD can not do that such job perfectly.

This program retains only layer colors from external reference (xref) to this drawing that has xref attached. AutoCAD uses system variable VISRETAIN to control the visibility, color, linetype, lineweight, and plot styles of xref-dependent layers and specifies whether nested xref path changes are saved.

By default, VISRETAIN = 1, all changed properties of xref layers are saved in this parent drawing. If VISRETAIN = 0, xref in parent drawing will get all properties back from child (xref) drawing.

If you change layer colors in child drawing and want to update only layer colors in parent drawing and keep other properties of layer state (visibility, linetype, lineweight, and plot styles), this program is the solution for you.

Activate file ColorRetain.exe to open the program.