Drawings may be imported from the Manifold Geocoding Database that is provided on the Manifold DVD. The geocoding database provides information on streets and addresses in the United States that is organized on a county basis, but it also includes supplementary cartographic information. Although the principal use of the geocoding database is to provide address range data for street address geocoding the data may also be used to create drawings that show streets and hydrological features within the United States.
Like the rest of Manifold's street address geocoding capability, import from the geocoding database becomes operational only when the optional Manifold Geocoding Tools package is installed. If you do not have the optional Geocoding Tools package, you will not be able to take advantage of the import capability described in this topic.
See the Import Drawing - Geocoding Database topic and the Geocoding Data Sources topic for additional information, including instructions for installing the Manifold Geocoding Database from DVD onto your hard disk. If you have not installed the Manifold Geocoding Database, you will not be able to follow the procedure described in this topic.
This example shows how to import a drawing for Placer County, California. We then separate hydrological features into a second drawing and combine the two drawings into a map. Even those users outside the United States who are not interested in drawings of counties in the US should still read this example for an illustration of the technique of using a data attribute field to select objects within a drawing and move them to a separate drawing.
Step 1: Import Drawing
Choose File - Import - Drawing to launch the Import Drawing dialog.
In the Import Drawing dialog choose Geocoding Database Files in the Files of type box and then browse over to the folder in which the Manifold Geocoding Database files have been installed. Double click on the states.dat file.
Note: to use this procedure you must know where the geocoding database has been installed and be able to find the states.dat file. By default, the geocoding database is installed in the C:\Program Files\Manifold System\GCDB folder. If you or someone else installed the geocoding database in a different location, such as on a network share, make note of where it was installed and browse to that folder.
In the resulting Import Geocoding Database dialog specify Placer, CA as the county name. Note that even though the technical name of the county may be "Placer County" we don't use the "County" appendage.
All fields are checked for import by default and for the sake of this example we don't bother un-checking any fields. Since most people will use this particular import capability to create background maps of streets or other features in applications where technical details of address ranges and other fields are not required, in many cases users will import only the Street and CFCC fields. But for now we just import everything and click OK.
The result is that a new drawing appears in the project pane.
If we open that drawing we see that it shows features in Placer county and has already been thematically formatted by default.
Clicking open the thematic format for foreground color of lines, we can see that the thematic format uses the CFCC field to thematically format colors based upon the various feature codes in the CFCC field. Even if we were unfamiliar with the standard values used in by the Census Bureau to encode different features in the CFCC field, we could easily guess that feature codes beginning with an H represent hydrology, that is, water, features.
See the Import Drawing - Geocoding Database topic for a list of CFCC codes.
Step 2: Select Hydrology Features
As imported, the drawing contains all features available within the geocoding database. Features have been thematically formatted to set them apart. That is a typical way to use a drawing that contains many features, especially if it is just intended as a background for other layers.
At times it may be more convenient to separate out the contents of a drawing into different drawings, for example, to separate out hydrology features into a separate drawing. Or, perhaps we would like to simplify a drawing by removing features that are not of interest. Doing so within Manifold is easy: we select the desired features and Cut them out of a drawing. We can then Paste them into a new drawing or simply discard them. Let's use hydrology features as an example.
To select all hydrology features we use the selection toolbar to select all CFCC features that contain the letter H. Since CFCC codes only contain one letter, the initial letter, using a relatively simple selection method such as "containing H" will select all records for hydrology features since all of the CFCC codes for such features begin with H, as we can see by reviewing the table of CFCC codes given in the Import Drawing - Geocoding Database topic.
When we press the Select button in the toolbar all of the hydrology lines (those lines with an H in their CFCC field) are selected.
Step 3: Cut Hydrology Features and Paste as New Drawing
To Cut the lines out of the Placer drawing we click on the drawing to make sure it has the focus and then we do either an Edit - Cut or simply a CTRL-X, the standard Windows keyboard shortcut for Cut. Doing a Cut as opposed to a Delete will not only delete the lines from the drawing but will also Copy them to the Windows clipboard.
The lines disappear from the Placer drawing. To put them into another drawing, we can right click onto the project pane and choose Paste to paste them from the Windows clipboard into a new drawing. We could also use, if desired, the Windows keyboard shortcut for Paste by doing a CTRL-V.
The result is that a new drawing, called Placer Drawing 2 appears in the project pane.
If we open that new drawing we see it contains the hydrology lines that were cut out of the original Placer Drawing.
Step 4: Create a Map
It's often the case that we would like to keep different classes of lines, such as streets or hydrology lines, within different drawings and then show those different drawings together as layers in a map. Creating a map is easy.
We begin by renaming Placer Drawing 2 into a more descriptive name. We'll call it Placer Hydro. Next, we right-click on the Placer Hydro component in the project pane and choose Create - Map.
In the Create - Map dialog we check the boxes for both Placer Drawing and Placer Hydro and we press OK.
When we open the resulting map we see it contains both drawings as layers.
Notes
Placer County gets its name from the nomenclature of the California Gold Rush in the late 1840's. A placer is a deposit of gold-rich sand or gravel, as are found in the Western foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range on the border between California and Nevada in the United States.
Placers were formed tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago when streams eroded the mountains and carried bits of gold worn from the hard rock of the Sierras downstream. Where streams took a bend, the rushing water slowed down and the reduced velocity of flow allowed the very heavy gold to settle at the bend, often at the same location where a gravel bank or deposit of sand would also build up.
Over time the streams dried up and their beds and banks were covered up by soil and scrubland and forests, but the beds where gold accumulated remained. A lucky or skillful miner might find such a placer and discover extremely rich concentrations of gold. Placer County stretches from the California central valley Eastward up into the foothills and mountains of the Sierra Nevada. It includes territory in which some of the richest gold strikes in history were made.
Although made famous by the California Gold Rush, placer deposits occur throughout the world, wherever erosion of gold-bearing rock and the flow of ancient streams have accumulated a mix of gold and sand or gravel.
See Also