Map Editor User Guide - Introduction

JH Labs Home

Introduction

Installation
Quick Start
Importing
Navigation
Layers

Feature Layer
Image Layer
Graticule Layer
Daytime Layer
Scalar Grid
Vector Grid

Drop Shadow
Blur
Lighting

Rendering Maps
Coordinate Systems
Projections
Tools
Plugins

Installation

At present, there is no installer for the Map Editor. Simply unpack the archive and copy its contents onto your disk, making sure not to rearrange the folder structure.

Running the Editor

The editor will run on any computer with a Java 1.3 virtual machine. For convenience, wrapper applications are provided for Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. Depending on your platform, you may or may not get icons for the wrapper and map files and plugins. If you do, they look like this:

The Map Editor icons: Application, Map file and Plugin

For Windows:

Double-click on the application Batch file.

For Unix:

Go to the Map Editor folder and type "mapviewer" in the terminal window.

For Macintosh:

Double-click on the application or a map file, or drag a map file onto the application.

On other systems or if all else fails:

Type the command:

java -cp MapViewer.jar MapViewer

or its equivalent for your machine.

If all goes well, you will see the Map Editor splash screen followed by a window containing an empty map. On startup you may get error messages appearing if a plugin module cannot be loaded for some reason. This is usually caused by a missing Java extension or library and is harmless, although you won't be able to use the plugin in question. You can prevent these messages in the future by fixing the problem or by removing the offending plugin from the plugins folder.