Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Redline Symbols in GTViewer

GTViewer has a variety of Redlining tools ranging from basic line drawing to dimensioning to hyperlinks. Symbol Placement is one of these redlining tools that is sometimes overlooked by the users because it is not enabled by default. However, it is very easy to configure and it can provide an easy way for users to select and place symbols on their maps.

The Redline Symbols are found on the Redline Toolbar and on the Draw Menu.



Clicking on its toolbar button will display the Select Symbol dialog box shown below which support a variety of views.

Icon View:



Detailed View:



The Select Symbol dialog is non-modal and can be left up while using GTViewer. Double-clicking the mouse on one of the symbols will activate the placement mode and the symbol will be attached to the cursor. While moving the symbol around with a mouse or stylus, it can be scale and rotated in various ways (rotation and scaling buttons are on the toolbar and the Shift Key plus an Arrow Key on the keyboard can be used).

A Symbol can be any character from any font defined in GTViewer’s .GTM file. The font can be a standard GTViewer font (.dfn file) or a TrueType font and can be a text font or a symbol font. The Symbols also support a fixed scale (so that they can automatically match the scale of other symbols already used in the data) ; however, they symbols can be scaled and rotated by the user at any time.

The symbols are defined in the .GTM file in the Symbols Section which defines a set of symbol groups and then the symbols that go into each group.

The Symbol Groups will be listed in the Symbol Selection dialog box in a combo box. Selecting a group in the combo box, will display only the symbols for that group. Grouping is an easy way to separate a large number of symbols so they are easy to find and out of the way if not used by a particular set of users.

A group must have a unique number (they do not have to be sequential) and you must have at least one group. Then for each group you define a set of symbols for it to include along with their placement properties. See the GTVConfig.doc file for details on defining a Symbols section in your .GTM file.

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