10 Things Update

Well most people know me as a Manifold fanatic, but here’s some things I’d like to see improved in Manifold.

1. Drag and drop inside Manifold – not following on from James’ thread, but more internal to Manifold – I’d like to be able drag multiple Drawings/Images/Surfaces/Maps/Folders (folders becoming sub-folders) into Folders or into another Map file.

2. Select Multiple Objects in Panes – following on from 1. the ability to select multiple items would make some tasks less laborious, e.g. in the Layers Pane I want to move several layers down to the bottom, at present I have to move each layer individually, if I could select multiple layers and move all down to the bottom with a single click I’d be a happy chap.

3. Copy Views – All my maps are presented at a regular scale and I use Views extensively. The ability to inherit a set of views from a Map component would be a time saver.

4. Layout Object Sizing Tools – Need to add precision to all Layout objects – I use image files for logos and I find it a real pain not to have precise control over the size of the image component once I drag it into the Layout. I want to be able to specify in a dialogue that the image should be 25×25mm.

5. Arrowhead Size Independent of Line Size – There’s no easy way to get a large arrowhead and a thin line, as arrowhead size is directly linked to line thickness.

6. Map Rotation – I tend to keep my maps orientated so that north points up, but there are projects where they would be better orientated to suit the property extents, this can be currently achieved by rotating the map component in the layout, however all the labels are still aligned to north. If there was a way to rotate the view in the map itself, with labels automatically adjusting to the current view alignment this would cut out a lot of manual label adjustments.

7. Snaps – need to add to current snaps with perpendicular, midpoint and midpoint between 2 points. Mimicking AutoCAD’s object snapping would be the way to go with markers denoting which snap is available.

8. Linked Query Labelling – writing an SQL query and linking it as a drawing is a fantastic capability; the one and only one drawback, is if you create a labels component linked to the query and manually edit the position of labels or set on the Per-Label-Formatting to change the format of individual labels, as soon as you refresh the query all manual edits are lost, with labels resuming to their original position/format. Changing this behaviour so that linked query labels retain their edits would be desirable. The only workaround is to unlink the query to create a standalone drawing – not ideal if your data has frequent updates.

9. Layout Element Formatting – Need to add full entity creation and formatting to Layout component – this almost like having a drawing component for the layout where one can add a line/point/area/text in the layout and can format it to any style available to drawings.

10. Enhanced Labelling – I need to add data tables to maps/layouts to show results of monitoring of various parameters over periods of time. What I’d like to see is the capabilty of labels enhanced to be able to create data boxes, that I currently have to create in Excel and copy and paste into Manifold as images. If I could create labels generated from tables inside Manifold, with the ability to format tables – e.g. if a value of a parameter exceeds a guideline the background of the value is highlighted in yellow.

This capablity is partially already there, but where I have various sized data boxes, some locations have more data than others, Manifold’s labelling engine produces wierd results. (I will add images of what I’m looking for later).