Map Sheet - Ugly scale bar and north arrow and coordinates. What's your opinion?

flingflong

We all love Global Mapper and its a great program to run in the background of a project.....

However unless I'm doing it wrong, its terrible for creating anything close to a decent chart with shocking/ugly cartoon like scale bar and north arrows.

Some decent north arrows, scale bars, and ability to show both projected and geographic coordinates, placing tick-marks inside the frame to save space, would go a long way to making the maps close to being useable for serious charting.

sphillips

Totally agree. No one in our company will use Global Mapper for figure production for that very reason. Another major issue is that all the styles are listed as text - so you have no idea what the style looks like until you click OK and then Apply. Why can't we just see the styles in a gallery like every other GIS program?

FYI we only use Global Mapper for importing, exporting and analysis.

CarrickCon

I agree that the Map Layout Editor (MLE) is very much the weak link in GM, which is disappointing given that most (non-analysis) users I know are ultimately trying to produce maps/figures/drawings as an end product. While the MLE is slowly improving with each new version (the ability to add arrows for instance only just appeared in last version or so!) it still has a long way to go IMHO.

@flingflong - one of the workarounds I use to produce "normal" looking north arrows, scale bars etc. is to import them as image elements from other packages and scale them to fit. A pain, but it helps...

@sphillips - good to hear from you buddy! I was using your workaround for defining the intersection between two irregular/sloping surfaces the other day (yet another thing I've given up on ever seeing in GM and have stopped requesting!) and was wondering how you were travelling.

Johno

Totally agree with the cartoon'ish description, production capability has been crude and disappointing for years.

That said GM is an awesome swiss army knife and #1 for working with data, and it's great for flicking out quick and stunning visual results via email, or into documents after annotation the image with something like PowerPoint or Visio.

But for something presentable as a map per se I would export a final calibrated GM screen image and/or the resultant vector data into another GIS app to build the result.

It's a bit sad, the kind of brilliant tool you would use in the background to achieve miracles but it's own worst marketing enemy with the other apps getting the glory.

DerrickW

I agree as well. Through great effort we've been able to piece together some decent figure templates to use in Global Mapper, but it really is the software's Achilles heel.

BenF

I agree though scale bar look a lot better if you shrink the font which shrinks the scale.