Map in­ter­face

The map in­ter­face is the core of Map­board GIS. When work­ing within a pro­ject, the map is al­ways avail­able, and in­ter­ac­tions with it fol­low the ac­tive sta­tus of the Mode switcher. All tool set­tings and op­tions are ad­justed in the Side­bar.

3D ter­rain and globe view New in v3.3.0 🎉

The abil­ity to tilt the map and work atop 3D ter­rain is dis­abled by de­fault but can be ac­cessed by en­abling 3D ter­rain in the Pro­ject set­tings > Map panel. The re­lated Globe pro­jec­tion is ex­per­i­men­tal and can be en­abled in the Pro­ject set­tings > De­vel­oper menu.

Edit­ing op­tions

The edit panel con­tains set­tings for the ac­tive tools used for draw­ing, eras­ing, and mod­i­fy­ing map data. Dur­ing map edit­ing, this panel will usu­ally be open. The con­tents of the edit panel change de­pend­ing on which edit­ing mode and fea­ture layer (Lines or Poly­gons) is ac­tive.

Move mode and ba­sic view op­tions

In move mode, map edit­ing is dis­abled, and View op­tions are the only con­trols avail­able. These al­low show­ing and hid­ing lines and poly­gons en masse. (Show­ing and hid­ing in­di­vid­ual types is han­dled within the fea­ture class op­tions.)

The view con­trols also con­trol an in­tro­spec­tion layer for con­stituent points of geome­tries, which is es­pe­cially handy for de­bug­ging topol­ogy er­rors.

The Draw tool

Draw mode al­lows draw­ing with a sty­lus (or a fin­ger, if en­abled in the ap­pli­ca­tion set­tings).

The draw­ing panel con­trols se­lec­tion of the ac­tive fea­ture class as well as cer­tainty. For the Lines layer, a panel also con­trols fea­ture snap­ping; this is re­placed by con­trols for over­lap­ping fea­tures for the Poly­gons layer.

The Erase tool

In erase mode, a bound­ing area is used to clip and/​or delete in­ter­sect­ing fea­tures. Eras­ing can af­fect only the ac­tive fea­ture type, or all types.

A Topo­log­i­cal erase tool, which ex­tends the eraser’s ef­fects to the near­est in­ter­sec­tion with other linework, al­lows quick elim­i­na­tion of dan­gling edges. New in v3.2.0 🎉

The Re­shape tool

The Re­shape edit mode splices new linework where it crosses cur­rent fea­tures. This al­go­rithm is fairly com­plex in­ter­nally, and has re­ceived ex­ten­sive op­ti­miza­tion to en­sure speed, el­e­gance, and ef­fi­ciency. New in v3.2.0 🎉

Se­lec­tion ac­tions

The Se­lect mode al­lows fea­tures to be gath­ered us­ing a lasso to be op­er­ated on by more ad­vanced meta­data-man­age­ment func­tion­al­ity. The op­er­a­tions in this mode al­low linework and poly­gons to be ad­justed af­ter cre­ation.

Many of these op­er­a­tions are ex­per­i­men­tal and sub­ject to change.

The set­tings panel

The Set­tings panel pro­vides ac­cess to a range of pro­ject con­fig­u­ra­tion not di­rectly re­lated to edit­ing op­er­a­tions.

The top seg­ment of the panel shows ba­sic, read-only in­for­ma­tion about the spa­tial back­end, pro­jec­tion in­for­ma­tion, and topo­log­i­cal tol­er­ance of the pro­ject. The mid­dle seg­ment con­tains links to set­tings pan­els for spe­cific func­tion­al­ity. The bot­tom pro­vides de­bug­ging op­er­a­tions.

Tile lay­ers

The Tile lay­ers panel pro­vides tools to add, switch, and mod­ify the basemap lay­ers that an­chor the map.

Ed­i­tor set­tings

Some less-im­por­tant edit­ing set­tings are rel­e­gated to this panel.

• De­fault line width: sets the line width used for fea­tures miss­ing the line_width prop­erty (this gen­er­ally ap­plies to fea­tures col­lected out­side of the Map­board GIS en­vi­ron­ment).
• Pen base width: sets the base­line width for the edit­ing pres­sure curve of of the Ap­ple Pen­cil.
• Sim­plify fea­tures: amount of smooth­ing to ap­ply to cap­tured fea­tures (keep low for high pre­ci­sion)

Topol­ogy man­age­ment

The Topol­ogy set­tings panel pro­vides a way to man­age the poly­gon-clos­ing be­hav­ior of the map.

Ex­per­i­men­tal fea­tures

A few ex­per­i­men­tal fea­tures are be­ing de­vel­oped to im­prove the map in­ter­face.

Ge­o­logic sym­bols

The abil­ity to use con­text-spe­cific map sym­bol­ogy is one of the key strengths of pa­per-based ge­o­log­i­cal map­ping. Map­board GIS is ex­per­i­ment­ing with sup­port for linework sym­bols that al­low ex­pres­sive maps that are ready for in­ter­pre­ta­tion right out of the app.

We are still work­ing on scal­ing, so ar­rows and ticks are gen­er­ally grossly mis-sized. Still, you can turn on the ex­per­i­men­tal sym­bols in the ap­pli­ca­tion set­tings panel. Even­tu­ally, we will also add ge­o­logic pat­terns for poly­gon fills.