Contours

I'm new to GM and have a few questions about contours.

  1. When generating contours, I select a Minor and a Major intervals. But if I open Config, it is evident that style properties actually align with Intermediate and Major. No Minor lines were drawn. What's up with that?
  2. Also, in Config, if I select that the label be centered on the line, a white background is then added. What if I don't want a background?
  3. Is there any way to control the layout of the labels? For example, in QGIS, you can specify that you want them to be horizontal rather than following the line. And, you can specify that the label be as close to the center of the line as practical in order to produce a more structured look to the contours labels. (see image)

Thank you,

Dave


Answers

  • I was confused at the contour dialogue when I first started using GM. (Apologies if I'm explaining something you already know, but your question sounds like the same issue I was having. )

    1. More than likely, you're confused about the setting when generating the contours. "Contour Interval" is your interval for ALL of the generated contours. "Minor Contours" and "Major Contours" settings are a multiple of your "Contour Interval" setting. So a contour interval of 2 would be 2ft contours and if your "minor contours" was set to 5, then you would have a minor contour every 10ft (2ft interval X 5 multiplier). I always leave my minor setting to 5 and my major setting to 10, then I just change the contour interval to suite the project (resulting in something like 5ft contour interval with minor contours every 25ft and major contours every 50ft). Assuming you already knew that and it's not the source of your problem, the other issue might be how you are applying the styling. You need to make sure that the contour layer itself is set up to "use default style based on classification" and also make sure the features themselves are using that setting.

    This is the result:


    . If you are overfeature typeristyle ting the style of your contour "line style" and just manually setting it, then you can just change the option and uncheck the box for a background. If your contours are using the settings above to style ba, you need to go to tools->configure->line styles and change the symbology options for each of the contour layers. (***Often times when you do this, the changes will not be reflected in existing features and they will switch from "use default style for feature type" to "specify style to use when rendering feature". Select all your contours, right click, edit and change this back to "use default style...." if you don't see the change after updating the line style. seLabel Background Fill Mode" is the option you are looking ford on .yYou have some options in the same dialogue boxes I've shown screenshots of, but probably not all that you want. They're always going to try to align with the line itself (no horizontal labels). There's some tricks you could do like what surveyors do in CAD, but it would be kind of tough to show off through screenshots. Basically you could create point features along the lines and make the point have no symbol, but still display a label. This will give you horizontal labels. In many cases it might just be faster to add them manually in the map layout editor while you have line labels turned on as a reference, then turn them back off before rendering. ***Also, I've never tried to make a separate label layer for line features using the built-in tool that's fairly new, so that might be work exploring as well. our p

  • Somehow that entire post got messed up and i'm not sure how to find the draft that was saved. About to jump on a call, but I'll try to come back and figure out how to find the rest of the writeup I made afterwards.

  • dpitman
    Answer ✓

    Thanks, Derrick. I had found the background setting in the configurations dialog. It required clicking into the font dialog.

    But, I did not understand about the interval settings. Kind of unintuative dialog, but I get it now. I was hoping that the contours in GM would be more feature rich than QGIS which is open source. The minor/major aspect is certainly easier in GM but it seems to lack some display control that I expected would be there, oh well. In a GM video, they stated that some folks purchase GM just for the contour control so I expected too much I guess.