User guide

Page 27

visualise | communicate | ENGAGE The InstantAtlas Desktop Publisher

g the InstantAtlas Area Profile Template User Guide

green up/down arrows to re-order your geographies. The vertical

order you see in the Publisher will be preserved in the published report. In

the report, a contextual geography will be displayed on top of the

geographies below it and beneath the geographies above it. We

recommend that any point contextual layers you add are moved above any

polygon or line contextual layers for display purposes.

Once you have made your selections, click the ‘Next’ button. Alternatively,

click the ‘Back’ button to return to the ‘Choose Your Data’ screen.

B.3.5. Choose Your Background Images

This step of the publishing process involves choosing background images

if these are required. Background images appear in the map(s) of your

report to provide additional context and can be switched on and off.

Figure 38 shows the map in a dynamic report with background mapping

switched on.

Figure 38

The background images for a report can come from the following sources:

1. A collection of images on a local or network drive

2. A Web Map Service (WMS)

3. A ArcGIS Server map service

4. Google Maps

B.3.5.1. Adding Images from a Background Image Collection

Any geo-referenced images saved on a local or network drive can be

displayed as background mapping. We strongly recommend that each

image is no larger than 1 MB in file size. It is important to keep the file size

down as the larger the images, the longer it will take for them to load into a

report. If your images are larger than 1MB, you can process them to

reduce their file size or you can split one image into separate tiles (the

report will only load the tiles it needs to fill and map at any given point in

time).

To include a layer of background mapping, you must upload an index file

into the Publisher. Each layer must have a separate InstantAtlas index file.

This index file is an XML file (.xml) that specifies geographic coordinates

for each image included in the layer of background mapping. Without this

information, InstantAtlas reports would be unable to position background

images correctly in the map(s). A sample index file can be found in the

‘images’ folder created during the installation of your InstantAtlas software.

This folder is a convenient place to store all of your background images

and index files. It is important that an index file is stored in the same folder

as the images that it references.