I have several documents with multiple layers, and by multiple I mean up to 100 or so. They are all very simple layers, most times with one word. The files are for printing to a laser engraver which has a standard shape on one layer, and the rest of the layers are single words that are centered to the shape layer. When I print, the shape layer is "visible" but not printable or selectable. Just one text layer is visible, printable, and selectable (for the purposes of printing "center/center" to the center of the wood piece being engraved). So, I'm only printing one layer at a time.
Here's the issue: The object manager obviously has a multitude of layers, all of them invisible except for the layer to be actually printed, and the shape layer visible just for visual reference. Many times, when I change a layer to invisible from visible (or vice versa), or change a layer from printable to non-printable (or vice versa), or make a layer selectable to non-selectable (or vice versa), the object manager will jump to another layer entirely, marking that layer with the change I made to the original layer (while also making the desired change to the original layer). So, it's doing its job, and then some. If I change layer 27 to "visible", for example, object manager will also jump to layer 54 and make the same change. I have to change layer 54 back to "invisible" and scroll back to layer 27 to resume work. I'm lucky, I guess, that at least it goes right to the unintended layer when it does this jumping around, but I still have to find my original layer to resume work. It happens with every change, so I'm spending a lot of time jumping all over the layer list in object manager. I can't seem to come up with a pattern for this behaviour, it seems the layers with the unintended changes are randomly chosen.
Sorry about the length of this question, but it's a little difficult to explain. I guess this might open up the discussion of "how many layers is too many layers", but these layers have extremely limited simple content.
Are you willing to share a file so that others might see if they see the same behavior in the Object Manager when working with it?
I just added an addendum to my original note, and because the weird behavior isn't always in play, I'm not sure that supplying a file would help.
If this is a "once in a blue moon" behavior, then it could be very frustrating to try to replicate it.
If it's something you see fairly frequently - as in, keep messing around in the Object Manager with the file, and the problem shows up often within, say, 30 such layer-status-changing operations - then I would be willing to take a swing at it.
If you have privacy reasons for not wanting to share the file, that's cool; I understand.
It's easy for me to use a VBA macro to create a many-layered document with an Artistic Text object on each layer.
Are your many layers page layers? Or master layers?
It seems that the behavior is present at the opening of the file, I don't seem to remember it "cropping up" after some previous operations that succeeded. These are all page layers.
I reread my earlier post, and I don't want to give the impression that the weirdness starts midway through working on a file, it seems to be there or not from the start. I can tell you that any file created to run this epilog engraver will tend to have many layers, sometimes numbering a hundred or so, but each layer has very simple content (like, as you say, one word of artistic text), and only one layer at a time is printing.