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No City, Town, Community Names on Topos

Started by doakerw, February 11, 2012, 11:56:49 AM

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doakerw

Is there no city, town, etc names on the Topos. Maybe I just don't know how to display them.

Boyd

What are you using to view the maps? Mapsource? Basecamp? Or the GPS itself?

Mapsource can be kind of pesky about display town names sometimes. Try zooming way in and see if they show. The newest versions of basecamp are better, and there are preference settings for what you want to show. Be sure to set detail to maximum.

On the GPS, it can vary by model. The Nuvi series often doesn't show town names, and there is nothing you can really do about that. Handheld/outdoor models will have a map setup menu that allows you to control the zoom level at which names are displayed. On any GPS device, try setting map detail to the highest setting also.

Seldom

Quote from: doakerw on February 11, 2012, 11:56:49 AM
Is there no city, town, etc names on the Topos. Maybe I just don't know how to display them.
Which topos?  Some transparent topos, meant to be overlaid on top of routable non-transparent maps, like the ones I made for southern Utah and Northern Arizona wouldn't include them, because they would duplicate (and conflict) with the map underneath.

doakerw

I have Oklahoma topo and Colorado topo11 in BaseCamp. I have zoomed all the way from several miles down to 20ft with no names.

Boyd

Go to Tools > Options > Display and move the Label slider all the way to More. Also check View > Toolbars > Detail and be sure it's set to Highest. If you still don't see anything, select Cities from the dropdown menu  next to the Find box then click the green arrow. You should get a list of all the cities near your position. If it's not on that list, it's not on the map.

Seldom

I just looked at a CO Topo (don't know whose, IndyJpr's) with BaseCamp 3.3.1.
Searching for nearest Cities with no name filled in it only returned the 15 cities nearest the center of the screen.  Is there any way to bump up the displayed cities to say 100?  MapSource gives you an option to do this, but I couldn't find it in BaseCamp.

doakerw

I did all 3 things suggested by you, Boyd, to no avail. I guess they're not on there. The Co and Ok Topos I have in BaseCamp  were done by maps4gps.

Boyd

In that case I suspect he will be along before too long to provide an answer. :)

maps4gps

The USGS geographic names information system (GNIS) was used for POIs and included city and town names.  There are over 192,000 entries in the Populated Areas classification which unfortunately includes not only cities, towns, etc. but also historical (no longer occupied), trailer courts, etc features.  The Bureau of Census recognizes 10,163 cities and 4,365 towns.  Like most of the over 2 million POIs included from GNIS, all of the Populated Area features at set to display at about the 0.2 mile level.  To do otherwise would cause too much clutter or take too much time to find and change the dispaly level of the incorporated areas.

If you have Garmin's basemap enabled, zoom-out to about the 5 mile display level and their city, etc. names will display.

I just did a city catagory search on my OR300 and all that was returned was the cgpsmapper 'watermark'.  Anyone else notice this?

Seldom

Quote from: maps4gps on February 12, 2012, 06:07:54 AM
I just did a city catagory search on my OR300 and all that was returned was the cgpsmapper 'watermark'.  Anyone else notice this?
Cities only show up on my maps where the maps us OSM data.  Desert Southwest has cities, Arch-Cany hikes and the others don't, except for cgpsmapper 'watermarks'.

doakerw

Again, maps4gps, I zoomed from 30 miles viewing every increment down to 80ft. There is no city, town names on Okalhoma topo showing in my BaseCamp.

Seldom

Of the maps I've got loaded, city search shows up on -Oz-'s Florida Topo, IndyJpr's Colorado Topo, my Desert Southwest and an "OSM World Maps" I downloaded for Texas.  I generated all my other maps using GM, and I suspect that I didn't specify MP_Types for cities, although I did have them correctly classified as GM point types.

Boyd

Quote from: Seldom on February 12, 2012, 07:31:57 AMCities only show up on my maps where the maps us OSM data.

Maybe I don't understand what you're saying? Why aren't you able to see cities on your maps, have you not used any in the data? I have no problem finding cities in the maps I've made based on GNIS as well as other sources. In Mapsource, "find places" is greyed out in the menu, but "find nearest places" works. I am using a registered shareware copy of cgpsmapper and use the option to make features searchable when I export from globalmapper.

When I import the GNIS file into Globalmapper 12, it flags everything as "City, Population Unknown". But I assign my own custom types, which are really simple because I don't like the big ugly default icons. I use 0x0c00 for all cities, regardless of their size.

Seldom

#13
Quote from: Boyd on February 12, 2012, 10:14:45 AM
Maybe I don't understand what you're saying? Why aren't you able to see cities on your maps, have you not used any in the data?
Queries in BaseCamp don't show them, and I don't see any on the map. (Except cgpsmapper watermarks).
I suspect I exported them from GM without an MP_Type specified and deleted them from GPSmapedit as unknown point types, but that's just a guess.  Guess was wrong, I just checked my GNIS.gmp file for UT, and found no cities.

maps4gps

On the lastest test version of 'US48topo', I have code 'cities' as 0x01 thru 0x0C based on population.  However, the display symbol is a small generic dot/circle for all these codes, both in BC and on the OR300.  There is some variation in label size as indicated in the cgpsmapper manual.