Styles and print layouts

#Styles

A style says how a layer is drawn. Each dataset can have several; one is its default, and each layer in an app can choose another. Studio → Styles lists them; New style makes one for a dataset.

#The style editor

• Symbol: for areas a Fill (colour, Palette, Fill opacity) and an Outline (colour, Width, Line: solid, dashed, dotted, dash-dot or long dashes); for points a Shape (circle, square, triangle or an icon) and Size.
• Icons: a catalogue of symbols drawn for the trade — manholes, cabinets, valves, hydrants, transformers, meters, and the geological set: wells of every kind (water, oil, gas, dry, abandoned, injection, proposed), boreholes, springs, sinkholes, strike and dip, mines, quarries, adits, sample sites, fossil localities, outcrops — and topographic signs such as survey points, poles, lamps, trees and fire hydrants. They are grouped, with a search by name in any language. An icon takes the fill and stroke colours you set, and is drawn as a vector: sharp at any size, on screen and in print.
• Lines: an Edge (colour and width) draws a wider line beneath the stroke — a road's casing, a pipe edged dark over imagery. Marks along the line add Arrows for a flow's direction or Ticks for a fence or a wall, every so many pixels, turned with the line.
• By value of a field: one symbol per value — choose the Field, Load values, and adjust each: its colour, and for lines and outlines its own Width and Line pattern; Draw other values with the base symbol covers the rest.
• Hatching, for areas: a pattern over the fill, in its own Hatching colour — Lithology (sand, clay, limestone and the rest of the geological set), Topography (orchards, marsh, rocky ground…) and plain hatching. It keeps its size in millimetres at every scale, on screen and on paper, as plans specify it. Each class of a layer can have its own.
• Sign of a standard: one of a standard's conventional signs for the whole layer or for one class — "fence", "fire-resistant building", a lithology — taking its whole symbol, and its name in the legend in the sheet's language. Used by plan sheets.
• Labels: a Label field, Text size, From zoom, Face (regular, bold, italic), a Halo for legibility over imagery, Uppercase, Letter spacing, and Decimal places for a number (12.3456789 shown as 12.35 with two).
• Label text and position: Text builds a label from several fields and words — {Name} – {Number}, a new line with Enter, {Reading|0} rounded to whole numbers — and Position puts it above, below, beside or on its feature, or along or above a line.
• Full size from zoom, for points: the symbol is its full size from that zoom in and smaller for every zoom out, as on a plan drawn to a scale, so symbols made for a detailed plan do not cover the map when you zoom out.
• Legend preview and On the map show the result as you work. Default style for this dataset makes it the default. Save keeps it.

Symbols you want to reuse can be kept with Save to library and applied to another style From the library (Studio → Styles → Symbols). Applying a symbol copies it: changing it in the library never changes a map.

#From ArcMap

A project drawn in ArcMap keeps its look: send Cartema support the .lyr files (or the .mxd) with the data, and each layer's symbology — colours, line patterns, markers, labels with their halo, the classes by field value — is converted into Studio styles you can then edit. What ArcMap can draw and Cartema cannot is listed in the style's Conversion notes.

Data migrated from an ArcGIS map service keeps its drawing too: its own picture symbols (the service's icons, drawn as they are), classes made by two fields together (a code and its name, as planning layers often are) with each class's colour and transparency, hatched fills as a light tint of their colour, labels with their scale, and the scales at which each layer shows.

#Importing a style (SLD)

Styles from other GIS software — ArcGIS, QGIS, GeoServer — can be brought in as SLD: Import style (SLD), choose the file or paste the XML, and import it as:

• Editable — converted into a Studio style you can change; the Conversion notes say what could not be carried over;
• Exact — drawn exactly as the SLD says, but not editable here.

An exact style can later be Converted to Studio style. When a delivery changes the data under a style — a field it uses has gone — the style is marked Needs review.

#Print layouts

Cartema has built-in A4, A3 and A2 sheets. Your organisation's own sheets are designed once in Studio → Print layouts by the workspace's owners and administrators; editors see them there, and everyone prints with them.

1. New layout: give it a name and Start from a blank page of a paper size (A4, A3, A2, Letter, landscape or portrait) or a built-in sheet. The designer opens. Duplicate in the list copies a layout to make a variant.
2. The page is shown at its true proportions with a Grid (1, 2, 5 or 10 mm) that elements Snap to. Set the Page, Orientation and Margin above it, and Zoom to see detail.
3. Add to the page: Title, Subtitle, Text, Legend, Scale bar, Scale text, North arrow, Logo (your organisation's logo from Branding, or Cartema's), Image (a picture you upload — PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 5 MB, stored as PNG), Frame (a rectangle, ruled or filled), Line, Credits and Title block. Every layout has one Map frame.
4. Drag an element to move it and its handles to resize it, or type its X, Y, W and H in millimetres. Order brings it forward or sends it back; Lock in place keeps it from being moved by accident. Undo, Redo, Duplicate and Delete work on the selected element. The keyboard works as in drawing programs — copy and paste, moves by the millimetre, straight drags, proportions, distances; press ? in the designer for the list, or see Keys in the designer below.
5. Set each element's own options: a text's size, Weight and Alignment (Start and End follow the text's language, so a Hebrew text starts on the right); a legend's title, Columns and the Layers it lists; a map frame's Coordinate grid; a line's direction, weight and colour; a frame's line and fill.
6. Texts can contain {title}, {date}, {scale}, {crs}, {project} and {author} (the person who printed the sheet), filled in when the sheet is printed. Tick Filled in when printing and write a question — "Client", "Drawing number" — and the Print panel asks for that text each time, starting from what you wrote.
7. Save. A layout is checked when it is saved: it needs its map frame, and every element must be at least partly on the page.

Saved layouts appear under Advanced in everyone's Print tool; see Printing. A designed layout prints exactly as placed: when the legend is switched off at print time, only the legend is left out, and nothing else moves into its space.

#Keys in the designer

On a Mac, ⌘, ⌥ and ⇧ take the place of Ctrl, Alt and Shift.

Keys	What they do
Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z (or Ctrl+Y)	Undo, redo
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V	Copy the selected element and paste it a few millimetres beside the original, also into another of your organisation's layouts. The map frame is not copied: a layout has exactly one.
Ctrl+D	Duplicate the selected element
Delete, Esc	Delete the selected element; deselect it
Arrow keys	Move the selected element 1 mm (with Shift, 10 mm; with Ctrl, 0.1 mm), whatever the grid
Shift while dragging	Move in a straight line, across or down — whichever way you have dragged further
Shift on a corner handle	Resize keeping the element's proportions
Alt on a handle	Resize from the centre: the opposite side moves the other way (with Shift as well, in proportion)
Ctrl while dragging or resizing	Place freely, without snapping to the grid
Alt, held	Show the selected element's distances to the page edges in mm, each with the distance to the margin beneath it; point at another element to see the gaps between the two
?	Show the list of keys

Keys typed in a field (a text, a number) stay in the field.