Atlas User Customization Features

[Carol Kankelborg]

I am teaching Acts and have been using the Atlas customization features to make maps for my class. There is a lot of power built into it, but I am also running up against frustrating limitations. This is what I would like to see:

 

1) For cities (i.e. Sites), I was able to make one layer of the major cities in Acts and a second layer for the minor ones, then combine them in a set. I would like to be able to do that with names of regions (to have Province names in one style and sub-regions such as Mysia in a different style) and geographical features such as specific rivers or bodies of water. In other words, I would like any label that exists in the atlas to be able to be added to a User Layer.

 

2)  To get around the above limitation, I created a User Layer for Roman Province names and one for the sub-regions. I would like to be able to rotate and spread text. For instance, Galatia is written at an angle in the Roman Empire layer. I can only place it horizontally in the User Layer. As a work-around, I made each letter its own text box and arranged it how I wanted it. To stretch the labels out, I added spaces between letters. 

 

3) It would be nice to be able to group objects together -- so that my letter-by-letter Galatia could be moved around as a group. I could not find a way to even select all the letters to move them together without grouping.

 

4) When exporting the map as an image, I would like a scale and route legends to be included. 

 

5) This may be more of a bug than a feature request, but when I put one of Paul's missionary journeys and Roman Roads as a set, the journey paths do not follow the Roman road system. 

 

6) Finally, before I figured out I could omit site names from the included missionary journeys of Paul, it was overriding how I had formatted the cities in the Site layer. I could not find a way to select priority when formatting of the same place name conflicted.

 

7) This is also more of a bug than a feature request, but the dialog boxes for editing layers & sets and the scrollable lists (for instance, the lists of sites and selected sites in the Custom Site Layers dialog) cannot be resized so long entries are truncated. I have to guess and figure out by trial and error what the full name is.

 

😎 (My attempt to number this as 8 ) was overridden by the emoji) I was surprised that I could not find a layer with the border for the province of Syria. None of NT Palestine, Greece, or Asia Minor contain it. The borders of Syria did change over the course of the NT era, but I was surprised it isn't included. 

 

 

[Carol Kankelborg]

I will add another feature request for the Atlas. I would like to see consistent text size and scaling across user layer labels and pre-existing sites/labels. 

 

I have a user layer with Roman Province names (I want province names to be a different color than regions. The provided Roman Province layer does not let me do that.) I want all the names to be the same size, in this case, 24 pt. But, I later wanted to add another province name, but I zoomed in. When I added the new name at 24 pt. it was a different size from the old names. In fact, the text size for the old names had changed. I didn't see a way to duplicate a label so that the copy would have the same properties. This makes it difficult to keep consistency. It would be better for text size to be defined at one particular zoom level and stay consistent, regardless of the actual zoom level. That way it will be easy to keep labels that I want to be the same size consistent and the size contrast between labels I want to be different in size to be consistent. 

 

A created a user layer with some place names not included in the sites list (Samothrace, Chios, Samos). The cities are included via a Sites user Layer. I tried to make the place names the same size as the cities since they are really all part of places mentioned in Paul's journeys. When I zoom out, however, the user layer place names don't scale like the cities do. In fact, instead of disappearing, like various map labels/sites do when you zoom out too far, they show up as a rectangle with the same color as the font. When I zoom in, the user place name grows much larger than the city names. I would like all text labels to scale in a logical and consistent manner so that native labels and user labels behave the same.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Thanks for this feedback! I'll add it to our list for consideration. If you find any true and reproducible bug reports, you can post those to Bug Reports, and I'll test them,.