Attributes

This blog post was written by Avenza reseller in The Netherlands, Hans van der Maarel of Red Geographics.

When you're labeling point features (let's say cities) in MAPublisher, using either Label Pro or Label Features, and you're not placing a label for every single point, you're left with the task of removing the points you haven't labeled. This trick will have the text inherit the attribute structure of the points including a lat/long and guarantee that there are no orphan points.

One of the best things about Adobe Illustrator CS5 is the amount of control for placing a registration point for points. With earlier versions of Adobe Illustrator, the point registration for a point is in the centre extent dimension (make a rectangular shape for the point's extent, then place a point at the centre.)

Here's a quick example of this. We start with a simple graphic, the green flag shown below.

The upcoming release of MAPublisher 8.4 introduces many new features. One of the new features is called Join Areas. We have received a lot of requests from our customers to create area objects by merging common attribute values. This geoprocessing function is generally known as "dissolve".

The picture below shows polygon objects from a USA Counties layer. The goal is to create a layer with state boundaries and summing the population count by joining the objects of the counties layer.

One of the great advantages of using Adobe Illustrator for a mapping project is that you can make great line styles easily. For example, to make a double line stroke and one of them is dashed:

Here we have placed point symbols for a MAP Point layer. However, we want to change the point angle using the Attribute values.