The screen

The Map Maker Screen
The Map Maker Screen

You’ve started up Map Maker and are already confused by the unconventional layout, which obscures all your other programs.  The floating menu has now disappeared and all you can do is zoom out!  And now that pointy tool doesn’t seem to do anything at all.

If everything is working as it should, the default project is an OS map of Dunbar and District.  There are 4 OS maps associated with this project, for you to uncover in a while.

The Zoom tool is in fact a Zoom to box tool and zooms out unless you select a box by clicking and dragging.  The box is rectangular to reflect your screen dimensions.

The plain point tool doesn’t actually do anything, to distinguish it from mapping tools that draw polygons and lines etc.  More about these later.

Back to the screen layout.  If you ever need to access another program you can minimise Map Maker via the menu bar or the top right hand corner.  To reactivate a docked Menu Bar click the vertical blue Menu – the docking facility is rather handy when you need to declutter to perform a clean screen grab.)

Windows programs can be accessed at all times by using the combination Alt+Tab. Try this and slowly scroll through your open programs and release when you hit the one you want to access.  You’ll need to learn this to skip between this text and Map Maker

Note the following:

  • the big buttons on the left of the screen
  • the mini buttons in the bottom right hand corner
  • the floating / dockable menu bar
  • the scroll bars with extended options
  • and finally, bottom left,  the map layers area.

More about all of these shortly, but for now just hover the pointer tool over the buttons to see what they all do.