Software of the Month Club 1996 February

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(mapit.txt) Shareware MAPIT User's Manual (V 1.2) Allison Software 166 Shady Lane Apollo, PA 15613 USA This document describes the operation and capabilities of MAPIT, a detailed world mapping system designed for use on IBM-compatible personal computers. CONTENTS: --------- Screen Layout Non-menu Functions Quick Tutorial MAPIT Details Menues Working with MAPIT Files FIGEDIT MP1TOMP3 Appendix A - Layer/Object Assignments SCREEN LAYOUT: -------------- MAPIT uses a mouse-actuated pull down menu structure in which commands are grouped by similar structure along the top of the display. Pressing the mouse's LEFT button causes the menu to drop down. Positioning the cursor over a menu command and depressing the LEFT button chooses that function. The bottom of the screen holds MAPIT's status line which displays the Zoom Factor, the distance across the center of the screen, and the Latitude/Longitude of the Mouse pointer. Sometimes instructions or information are written to this status line. NON-MENU FUNCTIONS: ------------------- Using the Mouse You can use the mouse in two distinct ways. DRAGGING - Some selections (e.g. Zoom by Corners) require depressing the left button to establish the starting corner or position and, WITH THE BUTTON STILL DEPRESSED, dragging the cursor diagonally to the opposite corner or position to be measured BEFORE RELEASING THE BUTTON. If you press and release at the same point when a drag is required, nothing happens. POINT & CLICK - Other activities, notably those requiring one-at-a-time point selections, look for the depression and release of the LEFT mouse button without any intervening movement. Sometimes use of the RIGHT mouse button is required to signal the end of multiple point entry. Lat/long tracking The status line displays the latitude and longitude of the cursor with precision down to the second. When you are zoomed out far, the screen resolution prohibits accurate positioning of the cursor. Zoom in for more accurate cursor positioning. There are times when MAPIT uses a cross hair type cursor for added accuracy in positioning. Left mouse button - cities If you press the LEFT mouse button over a city marker, the name and population of the city pops up in a small window along with indications of its being a national, state, or county capital. Depressing the button again closes the city window. Left mouse button - hidden text Depressing the LEFT mouse button over the triangular hidden text marker brings that text up in its predefined window. Depressing it again closes the window. QUICK TUTORIAL: --------------- This section will give you a high-level overview of the commands associated with MAPIT. See section MAPIT DETAILS for more detailed coverage. Read the two preceding sections SCREEN LAYOUT and NON-MENU FUNCTIONS if you haven't already. ZOOM Zooming brings you closer to the screen. In by Corners - Zoom in by dragging a diagonal across the area you wish to view. To Factor X - Zoom in or out to a specific zoom. Zoom 1 is the starting zoom value. To Standard World - Return to startup display. Redisplay - Repaint the screen. Sometimes necessary to see changes you've made in DISPLAY settings. Overwrite - Repaint without deleting. Accentuate certain features after unDISLAYing others. POSITION Change the position of the center of the screen. Center - Choose a new center with the Mouse. Drag - Drag a feature from one location on the screen to an other. Lat/Long - Specify the exact latitude and longitude to which you want to go. TOOLS Distance - Measure the Great Circle distance between multiple points while displaying the To/From Bearings on each leg. Circle - Display the range circles (curves) up to half way around the world. Plot Laser - Produce an HP-GL/2 plot for your graphics laser printer or to a file. Plot .PCX - Store a color image of the screen in a .PCX file. EDIT Changes objects in the databases or the way they're displayed. Objects reside on layers. (See Appendix A for object/layer assignments.) Current Layer - Switch to a different layer. The default Current Layer is 120 which is white in color. Set Layer - Change a layer's color or turn it on or off. Insert - Add objects: cities, figures, lines, stroked text, and hidden text. Delete - Remove objects by dragging a diagonal. Abort by clicking and releasing on the same spot. Assign to layer - Reassign all objects within dragged rectangle to an other layer. Copy - Duplicate objects from the primary database in the extended database. Copy/Delete - Duplicate objects in the primary and then delete them. DISPLAY Change what's visible. Subtly change the emphasis of overlapping features (e.g. Rivers/Boundaries) with ZOOM/Overwrite or dramatically change with ZOOM/Redisplay. Statute Miles - Choice of measuring distance in Statute Miles, Nautical Miles, or Metric. Grid - Toggle on/off the latitude/longitude grid. Rivers - Display various types of rivers Canals - Display canals Boundaries - Display political boundaries. Cities - Choice of Cities, Markers Only, or No Cities. MAPIT DETAILS: -------------- ZOOM: Zooming is a method of drawing closer to or further from the detail of a portion of the display you were viewing before. The initial zoom factor of 1 displays what we call Standard World: the display centered on 0 Latitude, 0 Longitude with visibility from 180 degrees west to 180 degrees east. You can use one of a number of different methods to zoom in to see more detail, or once in, to zoom out for a broader, less detailed view. Zooming in is necessary not only to see the additional undulations of a rugged coast, for instance, but to view new objects revealed only at the greater detail. If all objects were painted on the screen at zoom factor 1, even in miniature, all display pixels would be turned on -- the screen would be a complete clutter. Many objects, major and minor rivers, national borders, state and provincial borders, and cities, are not even visible except at higher zoom factors. When you zoom in too far, instead of seeing the smooth natural looking curves of coastlines, the underlying vectors comprising the database become obvious. The maximum zoom factor supported by the data is dependent upon the size and detail of the MAPIT database you purchased. Higher zoom factors demand much larger data files. POSITION: MAPIT allows you to navigate over the face of the globe by ZOOM and POSITION. ZOOM controls the zoom factor, the width of the displayed area, and POSITION, the center of the displayed area. The center of the display can be changed by several means. One is by using ZOOM/In by Corners, although this technique limits you to choosing a new center within the current viewing area. The POSITION commands offer explicit alternate methods. TOOLS: Both DISTANCE and CIRCLE are compute intensive functions which dynamically plot curves as you move your mouse. (If you don't have a math coprocessor, try the FAST versions which plot only the final curves.) You must double click on the last point of the DISTANCE measurement to show that you are finished and do not want to measure yet another leg. The To/From Bearing angles refer to the immediate end points. Over long distances, the bearing angles change along a great circle although at any point, the To/From angles are simple reciprocals of each other. The constant-bearing straight line is left for reference. Range Circles are circular on a globe but not on a Mercator projection especially over the poles. As you increase the diameter, the circle finally vanishes to a point on the opposite side of the earth. PLOT LASER produces HP-GL/2 output either directly to a file or to your PRN port. If you have an HP LaserJet III laser plotter or equivalent attached, you can generate highly detailed (to the limit of MAPIT's data) professional quality plots. If your printer doesn't have enough memory, try plotting at reduced detail. 1X is the default detail for the screen and is course for a 300 dpi printer. 8X will give approximately eight times the data resolution, and FULL will give all of it. Settings less than one (eg 0.5X) reduce the resolution. You can choose either landscape or portrait. MAPIT assumes a paper size of 8 by 10 inches. Choose the PCL header if you are outputting to a LaserJet and straight HP-GL if you are plotting to a pen plotter or to a file to be imported into a Word for Windows compound document (for which you'll need the free Word for Windows 2.0c upgrade.) PLOT PCX gives you the option of inverting blacks and whites so that the normally black background is white in your image. This differs from the Invert command found in some paint programs which invert ALL the colors. You have the option of plotting the whole screen including top and bottom menu areas, the map display only, or a selected portion of the map area. EDIT: The EDIT commands deal, more or less, with your ability to change and add to MAPIT databases. Current Layer - MAPIT supports up to 256 layers for entering and displaying objects. Layers 0 through 119 are reserved for the main MAPIT database. Layers 120 through 255 are reserved for users. Objects, by default, are place on the Current Layer. The user can view and reset the Current Layer with this command. Entering a return with no other value after display of the default value "[nn]", is a do-nothing action which retains the current Current Layer. Layer 120 is the default Current Layer. Set Layers - color on off The Set Layer menu choice brings up a lower level menu by which you can assign a new color to a layer (turn all rivers red, for instance) or turn on or off a layer or range of layers. This latter technique is how the object DISPLAY toggles work. All layers start off active but can be turned off to make them immune from any EDIT commands and from display. Turning off a layer does not delete already displayed objects that reside on that layer from the screen. They will be missing on the next repaint. Similarly, you can Copy and Delete only objects which are on "on" layers. Turning off a layer or range of layers is like write protecting it. Each layer has a color assigned to it. There are 16 colors, 14 of which are assigned to layers on a rotating basis. 0 black 8 gray 1 blue 9 light blue 2 green 10 light green 3 cyan 11 light cyan 4 red 12 light red 5 magenta 13 light magenta 6 brown 14 yellow 7 white 15 bright white Color numbers 1 through 14 are assigned to layers. MAPIT uses Black to overwrite and delete and Bright White to highlight during object selections. You can assign any color to any layer you wish. Objects on that layer will be displayed in that color the next time they are displayed. Set Layer defaults to all layers on and the standard rotation of colors each time MAPIT restarts. Custom assignments do not persist beyond the current session. See Appendix B for a complete layer color assignment chart. Insert - You can enter objects into the extended database. They are entered onto the current layer and displayed in the color of that layer. There are seven supplied fonts with a system capability of ten. Font number 1 is the default. If the font table is not found at program startup, stroked text will not display. If you call for a font not loaded, the system tries to use font 1 in its place. Font number 1 is the simplest and displays fastest. The more complex a font, the longer it takes to display a given text string. DISPLAY: Certain display attributes of MAPIT are controlled from the Display Menu. Clicking on them will either toggle them on and off or will pop up a third-level menu which will give you a choice of mutually exclusive options. *Statute Miles *Nautical Miles *Metric Choose one of these third-level menu items to set the choice of units of distance used during display and measurement. *Grid - Immediately turns on and off the latitude/longitude grid. Turning off the grid sets previously grid-colored pixels black which may continue to obscure detail until the next repaint. *State Boundaries - Use toggled display attributes to customize your display and accentuate certain features. Toggle off all rivers and zoom in on the northeast quarter of the United States. Without rivers, the display emphasizes the political. Now toggle on the rivers, toggle off the State Boundaries, and repaint without deleting by using ZOOM/Overwrite. The display now accentuates the physical over the political as the rivers overlay the State Boundaries. *Cities *City markers only *No cities This third-level menu controls the display of city information. Choosing *City markers only reduces clutter and speeds city display dramatically. The display of city text is compute intensive and will respond positively to the presence of a math chip. The absence of a font file will cause the names not to appear. WORKING WITH MAPIT FILES: File Names and Conventions: MAPIT's mapping data is stored in special binary files having the extension .MP3. These files have a highly structured internal format designed to speed the display of data on the screen. These files also have the useful property that two or more .MP3 files can be concatenated together to form a new larger file. (See the example below of using the DOS COPY command with the /B switch.) If the internal structure of a .MP3 file becomes corrupted, MAPIT responds with an error message stating that it has lost sync during a file read. No data beyond that point is available to the user. The file must be replaced. MAPIT uses two default file names: WORLD.MP3 for its primary database, and EXTENDED.MP3 for the current private database. You can run MAPIT against another primary database by explicitly specifying its name as you invoke MAPIT. > MAPIT alt_db MAPIT expects the alternate database to have the .MP3 extension unless you explicitly invoke it with some other extension. Anytime you enter data into MAPIT, the data is stored in the private file EXTENDED.MP3. You should use private databases when storing your own data or transferring it to others. The smaller file size makes these actions much more efficient. Copy or rename EXTENDED.MP3 to an unused filename to save the data permanently. > COPY (or REN) EXTENDED.MP3 myfile.MP3 Copy makes an additional copy of EXTENDED.MP3 while rename effectively deletes the original so that you'll start out with a fresh zero-length EXTENDED.MP3 the next time you run MAPIT You can combine several of your private files with the binary COPY command. > COPY /B FILE_1.MP3+FILE_2.MP3+... BIG.MP3 or > COPY /B FILE*.MP3 BIG.MP3 Remember that once files are combined, they can't be separated. Don't delete the originals until you are sure. And don't combine your private data with the primary MAPIT database WORLD.MP3. Regions: If, every time MAPIT re-displayed an image, it had to traverse the entire 28MB database, screen repaints would be extremely slow - perhaps taking dozens of minutes. The primary method MAPIT uses to speed the display from large databases is to divide the data into regions. Regions are special database header records whose extents are defined by the mapping data following them. Each .MP3 must begin with a region header. When you add objects to MAPIT, the first record written to EXTENDED.MP3 is a region header. As you add more and more data to the personal database, the data is appended to the end of the file while the region header is updated to reflect the new data. If, for example, all the data you enter is centered in the Indian subcontinent, the total extents of this new data updates the region header. When India is not on the screen, the EXTENDED file is not even scanned for possible displayable data. Its region header indicates that none of its data is visible. Region headers are created automatically, but you must be aware of them if you try to import or enter large amounts of data. The only way for you to start a new region header is to begin a new EXTENDED.MP3 file. In other words, rename the old EXTENDED.MP3 file to another name to force the creation of a new EXTENDED file when you enter more data. When you finish, concatenate the two files together to get a single file with two region headers. All this only becomes an issue when your files grow large enough that a linear scan begins to slow down MAPIT's over-all performance. This might happen, for instance, when a .MP3 file full of line segments exceeds 80 or 100,000 bytes. Then you want to divide your large single-region file into one with several non-overlapping regions. How can you create multiple regions from a large single-region file? Make a backup of the file, and then open it as MAPIT's primary data file. Be sure there is no EXTENDED file. Copy/Delete region-sized areas from the primary to the secondary file. (Copies are always from the primary to the EXTENDED file.) Exit MAPIT and rename EXTENDED.MP3 to another name - like X1.MP3. Repeat these steps until all data is copies and deleted from the original primary file. Finally combine the separate files using the binary COPY command: > COPY /B X*.MP3 TOTAL.MP3. The final result is a file with manageable regions. MAPIT's WORLD.MP3 database consists of a great many regions carefully constructed and designed to give reasonable performance in spite of the vast amount of data involved. If you try to copy a sizable portion of this data to your private database, all the copied data will be stuffed into one super region in EXTENDED.MP3. Performance will noticeably suffer when accessing your private database. FIGEDIT: -------- FIGEDIT is the figures creation/editing program used to supply figures for MAPIT. Figures are small drawings which you can insert multiple times in your maps. The figures are stored in files ending in the extension .FIG. When MAPIT starts up, it looks for the file STD.FIG and tries to resolve references to figures names from that file. Run FIGEDIT by entering its name. [If you enter figedit file_name, file_name is treated as a new file. The old file is not actually opened.] FIGEDIT displays a menu along the top of screen from which you can choose items. Depending if you are editing an existing figure from a file, FIGEDIT will display a bottom-of-the-screen status bar showing scale, entity count, figure title, and file name. FIGEDIT is an editor of memory-resident objects. When it starts up, there are no entities in the current figure and the current figure is nameless. At any time you can return to this state by selecting Figures/new . Add entities with the Insert menu. INSERT: One builds figures by entering entities from the Insert menu. As construction continues, a tally of the entity count is displayed at the bottom of the screen. There is an entity count limit of 100. The more complex entities consume more from that limit. Entities are entered by depressing the LEFT Mouse button at a starting location and dragging the Mouse to the ending location before releasing the button. Having selected INSERT/Line, for instance, you are placed in a line insertion mode until you exit it. Exit the Insert mode by inserting a zero-length entity: depressing and releasing the LEFT Mouse button without dragging the mouse. As you insert entities, they are displayed on the screen at 100% size. Remember that the final display size will be much smaller. The default is 10%. Detail will disappear or will clutter the final figure. CHANGE: Redraw - Redraw the current figure at 100% scale. Origin - Each figure has an origin. When you insert a figure into a map, you actually specify where the origin of the figure will be placed. The rest of the figure's graphics is displayed relative to the origin. FIGEDIT marks the origin with a blue cross. Its default position is at the very center of the screen. You can change that location to any place on the screen you want. Scale - Normally figures are not displayed in maps at the same scale they were drawn but at a smaller scale - as smaller pictures. The default scale is 10%, but you can change it to any value you want. FIGURES: List - Each figures file can hold multiple figures. List displays the names of the figures in the current figures file. Display - Draw the figure at scale. This shows you what your figure will look like in MAPIT. New - Clear the screen, close an open file, and prepare for fresh figure data. Edit - Read a figure from the a file and place it into the edit buffer for editing or transfer to another file or figure name. Save - Save the current figure to a name in a file. Save as - Save the current figure, named or unnamed to a name in a file. Figure names may contain blanks. FILES: Open - Open a file for input/output to FIGEDIT. TIPS: You needn't be in a figure or file to begin editing. You can transfer figures from one file to another by opening a file, Editing an existing file, and Saving as to another or new file. The key to good figures is to KEEP THEM SIMPLE. Detail which looks good at full screen is clutter at 10%. Here's where artistic talent is invaluable. .FIG files can be concatenated with the binary copy just as .MP3 files. MP1TOMP3: --------- A conversion utility designed to convert straight text files containing strings of latitude/longitude pairs as might be generated from a CAD system or digitizer into .MP3 file format. .MP3 files require about 30% of the storage as their .MP1 counter-parts. Usage: MP1TOMP3 data_file [/options] where data_file - the name of a .mp1 file to be converted to .mp3 format. A .mp3 file of the same name is created. options: /id - Region Id stored in the region header. /layer - Layer assignment stored in entity header. Defaults to layer 0. /minzoom - Min zoom factor stored in entity header. Defaults to 0. /maxzoom - Max zoom factor stored in entity header. Defaults to 0. The .mp1 file format is a simple ASCII listing of decimal latitudes and longitudes representing strings of connected points. String termination is marked by separator (blank) records. .MP1 File Format: variable length ASCII records: (latitude and longitude with comments) Data Records field 1 latitude decimal floating point number. Negative implies South 2 blank field separator 3 longitude decimal floating point number. Negative implies West. [4] optional comment beginning with a blank 5 line feed end of record (LF - 10) Separator Records field [1] optional blank[s] 2 line feed end of record (LF - 10) APPENDIX A - Layer/Object Assignments ------------------------------------- Coasts, Islands, and Lakes dark blue light blue green white major coasts, islands, and lakes * 1 2 additional major I & L * 1 2 intermediate I & L * 1 2 minor I & L 9 17 intermittent major lakes * 16 intermittent minor lakes 24 reefs 0 major salt pans 15 minor salt pans 15 major ice shelves 30 minor ice shelves 30 glaciers 45 Rivers dark blue light blue permanent major rivers * 1 additional major rivers * 1 additional rivers * 1 minor rivers 9 double-lined rivers * 1 intermittent major rivers * 16 intermittent additional rivers * 16 intermittent minor rivers 24 major canals * 31 canals of lessor importance * 31 irrigation canals 39 International Boundaries red gray at land 4 at sea 19 disputed 8 indefinite 34 Internal Boundaries gray states 8 Labels white red light blue state/provincial names 45 national names 49 rivers and lakes 54 oceans 69