Draft AVH map symbol set

What is this

A symbol set of over 300 locality icons for use in the Australia's Virtual Herbarium mapper and related biodiversity applications, suitable for MapServer and other map generation and plotting programs.

About the Symbols

The symbols in this set are provided as GIF and PNG images. The circular, diamond and triangular symbols are on a transparent background but extend to the full width and height of the image grid. The square symbols occupy the entire image grid.

The circular, diamond and triangular symbols are on a 9x9 grid and the square symbols are on a 7x7 grid to enable the symbol to be positioned on a central pixel.

There are a dozen or so colours to chose from that are hopefully reasonably distinct from each other; the bighter and primary colours will probably be the most effective. All colours have been chosen from the 256 'web-safe' palette althugh this does not seem to be important with modern browsers.

Implementation, use of symbols

How the symbols can be used is completely open. Perhaps they could be treated as sets that could switched in and out by the program depending on the context, or perhaps eventualy be user selectable

The plain circular square and diamond shapes will probably be the most appropriate default symbols, but the other with internal crosses, dots and other shapes might be appropaiate in some instances such as distinguishing infraspecies, cultivated specimens, very precice, very imprecise or dubious localities, etc.

The names of the symbols are totally arbitrary, aand wer chosed to be sort of intuitive during the compilation process. then can be changed to anything that makes programatic or contextual sense.

The symbol set

Red
FF0000

Orange
FF9900

Yellow
FFFF00

Green
00CC00

Blue
0066FF

Fuchsia
FF00FF

Beige
FFFFCC

Brown
996633

Aqua
00FFFF

White
FFFFFF

Black
000000

Grey
CCCCCC

GIF

;

PNG

Symbol design

Initial symbol set design by Jim Croft (jrc@anbg.gov.au), clumsily using IrfanView and Adobe Photoshop and the usual profanities.

If you find any mistakes, out of place pixels or dulpicated elements (other than the obvious white and black margins and fills on white and black) in this symbol set, please let me know and at the email above and I will try to fix it.

Now that a template and procedure has been established, it takes about an hour to create a symbol set of a dozen colours, create the transparent images and link the symbols into this index page. If there is any particualr shape (or colour) you would like to see included, send a sample image file.