Map Layout settings with GIS datasets within CAC software

CAC software themselves do not provide any tools to help you to lay out maps in a correct manner. This is properly done by the plugins. They help you to create:

Legend

Map legends include tools for quickly and accurately creating legends from the data found in the map attribute table, but also to apply strokes, fills and fonts to map elements according to user specified legend criteria. You can create a custom legend for your map based on its attribute information using the parameters you have defined. You can also assign legend info automatically in order to create a custom legend for your map based on its attribute information. This does not require you to specify a criteria or expression for each legend element.

Map Labelling

One of the most useful features, is the ability to create labels for map objects using values from the attribute tables. There are two methods of adding labels to your map:

• One way is to first select all the features you want labelled and label all of them by a specified attribute value.
• An alternate method involves applying labels individually.

Some other Layout settings tools are, for example:

• Automatic scale bar creation: Allows to include a dedicated scale bar creation tool that makes it easier to quickly and accurately add a scale bar to your map, complete with captions and subintervals.
• Automatic map index creation: Makes the tedious process of map index creation easy. Allows the automatically generation a text file counting each labelled attribute and its corresponding cell location. This text file can then easily be imported into various software.
• Map Scale Tool: mathematically converts the earth’s curved, three-dimensional surface to flat map sheets; the transformation feature converts the native coordinate system to scaled map sheets.