Excellant suggestions Albert. I agree 100%. I would love to see these implemented in the program. These features is what I would expect to be on a Mac.
Joe.
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Extended Print Layout Options
I'd like to see more options here like:
- Alignment options
- snap options
- preset layouts (icon driven set ups)
- saveable layouts
- autocenter or auto scale of layout area
- "live magnify window" (a selected area that is shown enlarged in another window on the layout, moving the live area also changes what is show in the separate area)
- selection tool
- simple drawing tools for additional shapes
- Option to remove borders around boxes (text, legend, etc)
- Option for shades of transparant background of boxes
- coordinate grids (selectable)
- autoscaling art board
- distribution of selected items
The attached screenshot is rough and icons borrowed from applications such as Illustrator and Photoshop and templates from Apple's Pages software. It's just an indication and all the features of course are just suggestions.
Albert Kiefer
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I also agree. It would be nice to not have to export the map to a graphics vector program (XaraX, in my case) just to do simple labeling. The boxes around text, legend, etc. in the layout are particularly unwelcome.
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I agree. I haven't found a graphics vector program solution yet as I'm not keen on forking out the dough for Illustrator just to touch up my maps. XaraX appears to import .ai but is a Windows app. (If anyone knows a good Mac solution, let me know.) Were Cartigraphica to export SVG, that might resolve the issue for me.
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Just an update here, that we're definitely going to be covering some of this ground in the upcoming 1.4 release. Not sure if I should mark this as "planned", since we won't cover everything, but we've definitely put some thought into both the UI and the feature set for layout.
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Cartographica 1.4 is now out the door and we can now speak definitively on what made it in. Other ideas which are not yet implemented are still good, and we've got many of them on the list at this point, but haven't had the time (balanced with the priority of other features) to get to them yet.
Here's what's in 1.4:
- Border control: 1.4 provides control over the presence and the size of the border through the Details… popover available on every object
- Text areas, legend, and scale now have settable background colors, using the Font panels Page Background object
And things we hope to get to soon:
- Alignment, distribution, snapping, and selection options for the objects themselves
- Simple drawing tools for basic shapes
- coordinate grids are in 1.4 as a new layer type, but in the Map View window and labeling isn't sufficient for many purposes
- "live magnify window" (preview navigation window to help with navigating large pages)
Things we're less clear on (either we don't understand them or haven't figured out how we can make them fit):
- preset layouts (icon driven set ups)
- saveable layouts
- autoscaling art board: We don't really have an art-board as such, we show the page, based on the selection in the Page Layout window. I don't expect we will have non-print areas available in the future, but we may support multiple pages at some point.
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