Monday, April 8, 2013

Add text label as attribute to polygon in Global Mapper

It is useful to be able to copy the text label from points (so called area centroids) to the enclosing area polygons as attributes. This can be done using Global Mapper's Add Attributes to Selected Areas from Points command. If the text labels are not already point attributes, then there is a simple workaround that can be performed to convert them into point attributes. The following example illustrates the workaround by simply exporting out the points as a Shapefile and using the exported Shapefile for the source point attributes.

  1. In Global Mapper, create, load and display the area polygons and points with labels.


  2. Select File | Export Vector Format.

    The Select Export Format dialog box appears.

  3. Choose Shapefile. Click OK.

    The Shapefile Export Options appear.

  4. Toggle on Export Points. Specify the destination point Shapefile name and location, e.g. C:\Temp\centroid.shp.


  5. Click OK.

    The point Shapefile is created.
  6. Unload the original point layer.


  7. Drag and drop the exported point Shapefile, e.g. centroid.shp, onto the Global Mapper's map view.
  8. Press ALT+P. Click on one of the points.

    The Feature Information dialog box appears.

    Note: the text label is an attribute
    .
  9. Press ALT+D. Click and drag to select all the area polygons and points.


  10. Press right click on the mouse.

    A popup menu appears.


  11. Choose Attribute Functions | Add Attributes to Selected Areas from Points.

    A prompt appears.

  12. Click Yes.

    A message appears.

  13. Click OK.

    The text label is added to the area polygons as attributes.

1 comment:

Friedhold Matz said...

Many thanks for sharing this with us and you have a great blog.