I've just purchased Geocart 3 in order to create maps of my travels. So far I'm pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to use. However, I've not been able how to get labels for populated places working.
I've downloaded Natural Earth's 1:10m raster and populated places:
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloa ... ster-data/
http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloa ... ed-places/
I can successfully draw maps with them, but the populated places only show as dots. I've not managed to work out how to display text labels for them (as shown in the naturalearthdata.com example).
Thanks,
Will
Basic Labelling Question
Re: Basic Labelling Question
Hello Will. Glad you’re enjoying working with Geocart. You won’t, unfortunately, enjoy working with that particular aspect of it. Geocart does not read the metadata (in the .dbf side-car file) that comes with Shapefiles. This means it will not automatically label them.
Geocart’s labeling facility is entirely separate from Shapefiles. It’s described in the manual as Appendix F, Typesetting databases. Geocart ships with a few label databases within the Labels folder:
We recognize Shapefile labels need to be honored. We’re mulling a strategy for that that works within the existing label facilities. We won’t have anything to announce for awhile. Apologies for the weakness.
Happy mapping!
— daan
Geocart’s labeling facility is entirely separate from Shapefiles. It’s described in the manual as Appendix F, Typesetting databases. Geocart ships with a few label databases within the Labels folder:
- Nations labels.txt
Oceans labels.txt
US cities labels.txt
US states labels abbrev.txt
US states labels.txt
World capitals labels.txt
World cities detail labels.txt
World cities simple labels.txt
We recognize Shapefile labels need to be honored. We’re mulling a strategy for that that works within the existing label facilities. We won’t have anything to announce for awhile. Apologies for the weakness.
Happy mapping!
— daan
Re: Basic Labelling Question
Thanks for the reply. It would be great to see this added to a later release.
In the meantime I'm wondering if one approach would be to convert the data from .dbf to the format used by Geocart.
Thanks,
Will
In the meantime I'm wondering if one approach would be to convert the data from .dbf to the format used by Geocart.
Thanks,
Will
Re: Basic Labelling Question
The main problem is that there is no standardized structure in the .dbf file as it pertains to geographic information. At a lower level, it is just a dBASE database, but what gets stored in it and the meaning of what gets stored in it, is largely undefined by the Shapefile specification. There may be de facto standards; those are what we would look into supporting.
Best,
— daan
Best,
— daan