Setting Up a New Map
Set your drawing canvas dimensions, drawing units, map scale, and more, including the ability to save settings as your personal default for new drawings.
Set your drawing canvas dimensions, drawing units, map scale, and more, including the ability to save settings as your personal default for new drawings.
Set your drawing canvas dimensions, drawing units and more, including the ability to save settings as your personal default for new drawings.
Ortelius offers you the flexibility to set your drawing canvas dimensions, drawing units, map scale, and more, including the ability to save settings as your personal default for new drawings.
Related Topics:
Index Grid Layer
Graph Paper Layer
The background of the drawing canvas can be set to be either a solid color or image.
HINT: Rather than adding a colored background for the entire drawing canvas, you can add one or more Border Layer(s) containing any fill or stroke style that is applied to the map area. See Adding a Border Layer for a Frame (Neatline) or Background for more information.
When creating a drawing for the printed page, your drawing area may be slightly smaller than your paper size due to paper printer margins around the edges. Optionally, Ortelius will subtract your printer page margins from the entered drawing canvas width and height. Paper margins are based on your current printer settings.
For printed works, Ortelius provides easy access to the Apple system Page Setup dialog. Use this menu to change printer paper size and orientation.
The ‘Map Margins’ define a sub-area within your canvas within which you will draw your map and graphics. This is also the area to which graph paper and index grid will be applied if you use them. For example, 0 (zero) map area margin will size the map area the same as the drawing canvas (no margin). If you will be using an index grid or have elements such as scale or map title outside of the map area, be sure to set map margins appropriately.
Ortelius drawings use “real-world” units of measure.
2. Under the ‘Map Scale and Units’ section, choose the type of units that you want to use for measuring on-the-ground distances from the drop-down list.
HINT: Imperial units, such as feet and miles, are common in the United States, metric units, such as meters and kilometers, are common internationally.
Whether it’s your backyard or an entire continent, when you create a map you are representing features on the earth. Clearly, in order to represent the features on a map, they must be reduced – or scaled – from their true size to fit on the map canvas.
Map scale is often defined as the ratio of a single unit of distance on the map to the corresponding distance on the ground (for example, one inch on the map may represent one mile on the ground).
2. Then do one of the following:
HINT: When drawing features using map units, Ortelius automatically expresses distance in largest whole units in the ruler. For example, a distance over 5280-feet is expressed as miles. To express distance only in the set units, uncheck ‘Always express distance in largest whole units’ in the map scale dialog.
Drawing Setup allows a “pre-scale” to be set which is applied to styles and symbols when they are placed on your map The default value is 100% and typically does not need to be changed.
The value is a property of the document, and is used to work with certain mapping specifications where symbols and styles are scaled up in certain situations. For example, some mapping standards have specifications for symbol sizes depicted at a certain scale (such as 100% symbol size with 1:15,000 scale maps), and larger sizes when the scale is enlarged (such as 150% symbol size with 1:10,000 scale maps). In this instance, the pre-scale setting can be changed to 150% and will apply to the entire document.
A document’s measurement display units can be viewed as points, drawing units, and map units. The setting is persistent, is saved with the document, and affects display of all user interface-related to distances, as well as the display of dimensions.