Viewer

The Blue Marble Calculator contains a built-in viewer for displaying both vector and raster file formats. You can access this window by selecting the View button or selecting Window>Viewer from the drop-down menu. Some options for the Viewer can be set in the Viewer tab of the Preferences dialog.

Note: The Viewer window does not perform any 'reprojection on the fly' to transform data in different coordinate reference systems into a common reference frame. It will only render data using the coordinates specifically defined in the input, and this is intentionally so that it may be used to quality check the exact coordinate values.

Add a layer to the window by selecting the Import Data Into New Map button on the Left of the Viewer toolbar. If detected, the coordinate system of the data will be displayed in the lower left corner.

If the loaded data has no reference information a dialog will appear with options to specify how to handle the referencing. For raster data, the following dialog will appear:

Specify a reference file, load the image with no georeference in pixel coordinates, or choose to cancel the image load. See also Viewing Tabular Data for information about specify coordinates in tabular data.

To change the background color to a more contrasting value, go to Options > Preference and navigate to Viewer tab to change the default background color.

To change the appearance of particular layers in the viewer, right click on the layer name in the Vector Layers list on the right and select Appearance. A menu will pop-up allowing you to select from various point, line, or polygon styles.

There are a number of different tool buttons available in the viewer:

Import Data into New Map

This tool allows the user to create a new map.

Import Data into Current Map

This tool allows the user to add one or more layers to the current map.

Remove All Layers from All Maps

This tool allows the user to remove all layers from all maps.

Save the Current Map out to Geospatial PDF

This tool allows the user to export the current data that is loaded into the viewer out to a Geospatial PDF.

Add an Area of Use polygon from GeoCalc

This tool allows the user to define an Area of Use by importing a GeoCalc polygon

Zoom In

This tool allows the user to zoom in on a map.

Zoom Out

This tool allows the user to zoom out on a map.

Zoom to Rectangle

This tool allows the user to zoom into a specified area of a map.

Pan

This tool allows the user to pan around a map.

Select

This tool allows the user to select a particular item from the map.

Select with Rectangle

This tool allows the user to select all items that overlap the rectangular selection field.

Select with Circle

This tool allows the user to select all items that overlap the circular selection field.

Recenter

This tool allows the user to recenter a map.

Reset Map

This tool allows the user to zoom so that the map is fully visible.

Go to Previous View

This tool allows the user to go back to a previous view (i.e. if the user just zoomed out, clicking this button will go back to the view prior to the zoom).

Go to Next View

This tool allows the user to return to the current view (i.e. if the user just zoomed out, then clicked Previous View, clicking this button will go back to the current "zoomed out" view).