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Map details: boundaries & place labels

Keep the detail that helps your reader and hide what gets in the way. The available rows depend on the map’s actual layers.

Watch tutorial video Opens YouTube · some videos show an earlier layout

See it on the map

Real map artwork · example settings
A Yorkshire map with green and blue territories, surrounded by uncoloured postcode shapes, town and village names and boundary lines.
Before hiding. The green and blue shapes belong to our zones. With Hide unassigned areas off, the surrounding postcode shapes and place labels are still visible. Compare this with After hiding: the map position, scale, zone colours and selected detail layers are the same.
The same Yorkshire map at the same scale, with surrounding unassigned shapes and labels hidden. The two coloured territories and their relevant map detail remain.
After hiding. Hide unassigned areas keeps the assigned territory and the useful detail within it, including relevant place labels and parts of wider boundaries. It hides the surrounding artwork rather than deleting it. Use the same control again to restore the full map.
Map details: boundaries & place labels — current GBMaps controls 1 2 3 4 5 6
The current panel, with its options expanded where useful. Select a numbered circle to read its explanation.

  1. Borders: show or hide each layer

    Tick Borders for Areas, Districts, Sectors, Counties or the other layers offered by your map. Untick to hide those lines without removing the polygons or territory assignments. Showing an area border and hiding the district borders can make an overview much cleaner.

  2. Width: set line thickness

    Choose a line width for each boundary layer. Use heavier lines for the broad divisions and finer lines for small districts. Review the result at the scale you intend to print; a line that looks fine when zoomed in may dominate a small graphic.

  3. Labels: independent from borders

    Tick Labels for a layer to show its names/codes. You can show labels without boundary lines or lines without labels. District and sector labels get crowded on a national view; they are more useful on a regional crop.

  4. Hide unassigned areas

    Focuses the map on the polygons assigned to territories and the relevant surrounding map detail. It hides unwanted artwork rather than deleting it. See the dedicated topic for how labels, broad boundaries and the Google preview are treated.

  5. Towns, villages and cities: Names

    The Names column controls settlement names separately for each available class. Start with cities and add towns or villages if the local detail helps the reader. These labels are part of the map artwork; they are not marker boxes you created.

  6. Towns, villages and cities: Dots

    The Dots column controls the point symbols independently of their names. You can keep names while hiding dots or use dots without names. These are built-in place dots, separate from the postcode dots created in Create Dots.

  7. Open or close a group

    Click a section heading such as Borders & labels or Places to fold its controls away. Folding a group only tidies the panel; it does not switch off its map layers. Extra rows such as Outer labels appear only on maps that contain that detail.

Classic GBMaps · Written by GBMaps · Updated Download this guide for your AI (.md)
Panel detail

Select a number to read its explanation. For small text, choose Actual size and scroll across the picture.

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