Friday, 7 January 2011

Making Sense of the Map Icons

I’ve imported all my Google Earth canal information into Garmin Mapsource to discover that the waypoints are displayed using a standard black icon that looks somewhat like the numeral 1 with a flag.  However, when I downloaded the gps coordinates of the various businesses the information frequently came with a small coloured icon.  Until now I’ve not been able to display this icon in Mapsource.

Last night I worked out how to make and display customised icons in Mapsource.  They must be placed in a special folder located here:

C:/Documents & Settings/[my login name folder]/My Documents/My Garmin/Custom Waypoint Symbols/[symbol #].bmp

The symbols must have a filename that is a number and be in BMP format.  You can use numbers 01-99.  I renamed all the icons I’d downloaded and placed them into the above folder.  <trumpet call> they appeared in the Custom Icon area in Mapsource.

The next thing I needed to do was design symbols for canal features (locks, services, winding holes, etc).  The icon needs to be no more than 16x16 pixels.  If I thought I was a bad photographer then I’m a much worse graphic designer.

06202831

Three of my icons - ‘Moorings’, ‘Lock’ & ‘Boat Facilities’

I now have the customised icons in Mapsource and have commenced the process of associating the icons with the canal waypoints.

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