Moshe, Thank you very much for your sharing your Maptitude scripts. I just have a quick comment about using images in a layout:
Inserting images in layouts should be done with caution. If you have the images in one directory and the layout in another, or you move files from one drive to another where there are layout files with images, you will basically screw up the layout and go through extreme frustration... For example, if you try opening a map and a layer file is missing (because you have moved it, e.g.), Maptitude gives you the option to browse for the missing file. With images, both in a map and in layouts, you do not have this option. With a map, you will keep getting an unable to locate image message for each and every image, and you have to click a "cancel" button each and every time for each image it can't find, and worse, you have to keep doing this if you zoom, pan, refresh, etc. Ditto for a layout, and on some occasions, if the image has been moved to a different directory or deleted, the layout will simply not open. If it does open, you have to go through the same clicking the "cancel" button for each image, each time you make any kind of changes to the layout. As an example, I had been storing many maps and layouts on an external drive. I recently got a new PC with a much larger internal hard drive. I transferred the external hard drive (e drive) files to my internal drive (c drive). This completely screwed up all my maps and layouts with images. The problem also a real pain when you have multiple users of Maptitude. Again, just cautioning about using images in Maptitude. I have found layouts to be the biggest pain in Maptitude. Don't expect a whole lot of improvement in 5.0. I have reported this problem to Caliper, and requested that a search for missing images dialog box be made available much like the search for missing layer dialog box is available. Haven't heard anything back though as far as a resolution to this problem. Otherwise, I think Maptitude is a fine product. Hoppe this makes sense! Mike From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Moshe Haspel Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 10:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Maptitude] Insert image into a layout Fellow Maptituders: If you're like me, one of the last things you do when creating a layout is to place a bitmap or jpeg logo on the page so that everyone will know who made the map. And you've probably been frustrated by how hard it is to get the logo looking "right" using the GUI: the "freehand bitmap" tool always wants to size the image to the dimension of the rectangle that you dragged and not to the actual size of the image. The good folks at Caliper will hopefully fix this in the long-anticipated version 5.0 (anyone want to leak us a release date?), and hopefully 5.0 will allow you to place formats that aren't as lossy (I'd love to be able to insert an .eps with a bounding box). But I couldn't wait any longer, so I developed an "Insert Image" macro. It's not much to look at, and it only does one thing (insert an image into a layout). But it has made my life much easier. I'm posting it to the "files" area in case others find it useful. The macro doesn't require any "administrative settings," so you can compile it as an add-in. I considered posting it compiled, but decided to include the code in the spirit of open-source. Enjoy.
