Area, Line, and Point Styles Tabs

The Area Styles, Line Styles, and Point Styles tabs provide the ability to customize how area, line, and point features found in the selected layer(s) are displayed.

The following style settings are available:

Load Style File

Load a *.gm_layer_style file to style the layer. This option is available when styling by attribute or assigning random colors to features.

Save Style File

Save the current style to a *.gm_layer_style file . This option is available when styling by attribute or assigning random colors to features.

Save SLD File

Select this option to save the style to an SLD style file. This is an OGC specified style format, Styled Layer Descriptor, used in some WMS implementations.

This option requires one of the following style options being set:

Use Default Style Based on Classification or Custom Style

This option is the default and specifies that features should be drawn and labeled using either the custom style applied to each feature, or the default drawing style for the classification assigned to each feature. The default drawing style for any particular classification can be configured on the Area Styles tab of the Configuration dialog, the Line Styles tab of the Configuration dialog, or the Point Styles tab of the Configuration dialog.

Use Same Style for All Features

This option specifies that all features in the selected layer(s) should be drawn with the same drawing style, regardless of type or any custom style applied.

The Select Style... button will display a series of dialogs to specify the style, based on the geometry type:

Apply Styling Based on Attribute/ Name Values

This option provides a way to base the drawing style on the value of a particular attribute. This is a powerful feature allowing the user to assign a style to a particular value for a particular attribute. Any features whose value for the selected attribute/ name matches the selected value will be assigned that style.

To build a style based on an existing attribute, select the attribute from the drop down list (Attribute/Name to Base Style on).

Use the Init from Values button to automatically create different styles based on the attribute values. The select style dialog will appear to allow choosing a base style. The colors assigned will be randomly generate starting from the base style.

When all values are numeric, there will be a dialog option to use just the min/ max value. This will produce separate styles for the minimum and maximum values of the attribute in the layer, as well as styles for the average value. Based on the data this may also produce styles for 2 standard deviations below the average (if greater than minimum) and 2 standard deviations above the average (if less than maximum).

For more information about style options see Point Symbol, Line Symbology and Area Symbology.

If the Interpolate Colors/Scale Between Numeric Values option is checked, any numeric values for the selected attribute/ name that do not exactly match a value will find the two closest numeric values and interpolate the color values in between those numbers.

Any features that do not have a matching attribute/ name value will use the default style assignment for their type or the custom style if one has been set.

Use wildcard (* and ?) characters in your attribute value to match on values matching some pattern.

Right-click on an existing attribute/ style pair to get a menu of additional options, including one to clone that item into a new value using the same style.

Example 1

The following area styles were generated from the default data (countries) using the REGION_UN attribute. the Init from Values button was selected, and then a base style was chosen with a solid fill color:

Example 2

The following point styles was creating by adding values and selecting colors of various sizes and colors. Because the attribute BDP_MD_EST is numeric, the size and color of the symbol is interpolated for all values between the specified break values because the Interpolate Colors/Scale Between Numeric Values option is selected. Note these points were generated by taking the centroid of the default data. Points that contain no value for the attribute use the default point style for the feature type, since there is no style defined for an empty attribute value.

Assign Random Colors to Features

This option specifies that each feature shall be assigned a random color, either from the full set of 24-bit colors, or from a collection of colors specified by the user in a palette. The user can use the Select Base Style button to assign the base style whose color will be randomly assigned. For areas, if the selected style uses no area fill, then the area border color will be varied rather than the fill color. For point features, you need to have a dot or custom shape (like dot, diamond, square, etc.) selected as the symbol for the color randomization to work properly.

The Style Same if Matches dropdown menu allows the user to select an attribute to style by when assigning random colors to features. All features with a shared value for the selected attribute will be assigned the same color.

Use Quiver Plot (Direction Vector) Symbols

Point Styles also provide an option to use a quiver plot symbol, where the size and orientation of the symbol are derived from attributes.

For more information see Create Quiver Plot (Direction Vectors) from selected points...