General thoughts for an advanced topo editing article

brendanheywood commented 7 years ago

I'd like to make an article with a bunch of small screenshot or possibly animated gifs showing different topo issues and how to improve them. This should be general best practice for anything we ourselves make and also something we can point people to. Some of these I can try to detect in the tool and warn about when saving but as usual more work.

Example taken from: https://www.thecrag.com/climbing/united-states/homestead/area/1049626368#n1121254305

Photo before hand stuff:

[ ] Use good high quality photos
[ ] make sure the photo does NOT contain anything on it, no route lines, no labels, NO borders. everything like this should be drawn using our tools for the highest quality result

Shared starts having multiple ambiguous labels

Solution move the label up to the unique part of the route

Too many redundant labels

Remove unneeded extra labels

Routes which has accidental extra segments

Click on bad point to select, then click to remove

Shared segments not perfectly overlapping

Careful check all points and drag until they snap. When creating these you can simply click on the first shared point and the last share point to clone a whole segment perfectly

Tightly packed routes have labels which overlap

Move the labels up to where the is more room

Route labels obscuring a belay or important rock feature

Move the label towards the middle of the pitch

Topo labels in rough 'lines' to make scanning easier

Move labels up or down so that they 'read' from left to right more easily

Shared segments not fully drawn

Also make sure a route is drawn in full and is perfectly snapped to all shared segments. The route line by itself is shown highlighted in some places without the surrounding routes so it needs to make sense standalone.

Upside down routes

Right click on any point and then choose 'Reverse route direction'

Here is a the full before and after example topo:

brendanheywood commented 7 years ago

@willmonks

brendanheywood commented 7 years ago

Some more stuff in a similar vein for area level topos:

Try to use rectangular areas unless it really warrants an irregular shape
Us the smallest amount of edges to a polygon to get a good outline of the cliff, but don't over simplify
where possible line the edges of adjacent areas
if there are irregular shape which are adjacent, snap their shared edges perfectly together
if the area enclosed has a natural boundary such as the top of the cliff, or gully etc, make the shape overlap to include some sky, or the gully so the edge of the shape doesn't cover the natural edge of the feature
pull labels away from cliffs into regions of low interest such as the sky or foreground
use the left/right/center and top/middle/bottom anchor setting to align the label exactly to the end of any lines

Before:

After:

brendanheywood commented 7 years ago

Another example for an area topo:

make sure the area boundaries have extra margins inside them so they don't overlap the rock anywhere as much as possible. This means you can clearly see the approach gullies, ground under the cliff etc
sometimes this means pulling the top boundary up into the sky so you can clearly see the sky line
if the labels are not adjacent to the area shape then draw a connecting line. If the labels are close to each other pull them away from the shape into 'free' space such as the sky, open grass, etc.
tune the label text by adding line breaks and possibly removing words like 'The' to make them more succinct
where possibly try to keep the edges of adjacent areas aligned to there is a seamless transition.
keep a consistent theme if needed, eg in this topo below it worked better to have some label lines on an angle, so where they are angled keep the angles consistent

Before:

After:

brendanheywood commented 6 years ago

Drawing a custom pointer for an area topo shape:

theCrag / website