Scribble Pad

The scribble pad is an invisible layer that you can turn on and off and onto which you can scribble, using specific drawing tools on the scribble pad toolbar (see figure 1).

By default the scribble pad layer sits over a map's node and link layers. Therefore whilst it is the front layer you cannot access nodes and links or their right-click menus etc.. You can however, move the scribble pad layer behind the node and link layers with the second toolbar button, or you can de-activate (hide) the scribble pad at any point with the first toolbar icon. Both these options will hand over your keyboard and mouse actions back to the map, so you can perform standard mapping functions.

Deactivating the toolbar hides the layer so you can see your nodes and links with out the scribbles. The scribble data will be kept for that session, so you can then activate (show) the scribble pad again to view your scribbles once more. If you close the map without saving the scribble pad contents, it will be lost.

NOTE: This facility is only for use with map views and will not work for list views. Also, currently, if you scale the view, only the node and link layers are scaled, not the scribble layer.

You can activate the scribble layer for the current map either from the Tools Menu, or the Scribble Pad Toolbar.

Figure 1. The Scribble Pad Toolbar.

On the scribble pad toolbar, as well as a button to activate and de-activate( hide and show) Activate Scribble Pad De-Activate Scribble Pad , the scribble pad layer, and move it to the front and back of the node/link layers , there are buttons to Save Scribble Pad save the scribble pad layer contents to the database, (against that map), Clear Scribble Pad and to clear all the scribbles on the scribble pad .

The rest of the toolbar has options for drawing (scribbling). There are currently four drawing tools available:

Pencil Tool	Allows you do free hand drawing.
Line Tool	Allows you to draw straight lines
Square / Rectangle Tool	Allows you to draw squares and rectangles
Circle/Oval Tool	Allows you to draw circles and ovals.

You can set the line colour for drawing by pushing the coloured square button which opens the Colour chooser dialog to let you select a colour:

Colour Chooser

Figure 2. The colour Chooser dialog.

You can set the line thickness using the drop down box which currently holds options from 1 to 10 pixels, the default being 1.

Figure 3. The menu for selecting the line thickness for drawing.

Below is an example of a map with some scribbles on it:

A scribble layer example

Figure 4. An example of some scribbles.

This is example is fairly meaningless, but you can image a situation where this would be useful to highlight areas or emphasise certain aspects of a map. These scribbles are not objects which can be moved or resized (not yet anyway), they are merely pixel painting over the map. For a given session of using the scribble pad, you can undo all the drawing done that session, in stages (each shape, or line, or piece of scribbling) with the undo/redo buttons on the Edit Menu or the Main Toolbar.

If you show / hide (activate/deactivate) the scribble pad layer on a given map it will hold the information temporarily until you close the map completely. If you choose to save the scribble pad contents to the database, then the scribbles will be re-drawn every time you open a map and turn on the scribble pad layer.

REMEMBER: Each time you make changes to the scribble layer save them, if you want to keep them permanently.