Please e-mail Keith Massie if you comments.
Updated January 24, 1998
Copyright 1997 Columbia Mapping
MAGIC Documentation
11/10/97, rev. 1/12/98
1. Additional functionality was added by loading more extensions when you start MAGIC. Two of the new extensions were written by ESRI. The new extensions are described below.
2. The "Add RLIS Themes" extension was re-written to conform to the directory structure of the RLIS Lite CD. All shapefiles in RLIS Lite can now be added as themes with this extensions.
1. The data structure has changed. See RLIS Lite release notes. As a result the RLISLITE and PRODATA environmental variables have been replaced with RLISLITE1 and RLISLITE2 respectively. See instructions below.
2. The "Add RLIS Themes" extension now has options for adding Hill Shading and Developed Land themes.
3. The default map ("make a view" extension) includes the Hill Shading theme, but it is up to you to decide when to draw the theme.
MAGIC stands for the Metropolitan Area Geographic Information Consortium which was a group of individuals from various jurisdictions who jointly developed a desktop GIS application. The MAGIC application utilizes the RLIS Lite data base which is derived from the extensive GIS data that is available in this region. The work done by the consortium was developed to run on ArcView 2.1.
After ArcView 3.0 became available, Metro converted MAGIC to thirteen ArcView extensions. Most of the original MAGIC functionality is included, but the inset map is missing.
MAGIC - This extension loads the other twelve extensions, any of which can be used independently.
Add RLIS Themes - Adds choices at the top of the "Themes" pull down menu for bringing in RLIS Themes with scale dependency and pre-defined legends.
Area of Interest - adds an "Area of Interest" pulldown menu for setting setting pre-defined map extents or scale.
Tax Lot Tools - adds a "Tax Lot Tools" pulldown menu, buttons and tools. These tools are used to select, display and list tax lot information. Most of the MAGIC functionality is included in this extension. Some of the tax lot menu choices are repeated on the tax lot toolbar.
Make a View - makes the basic Metro area view and sets the size of the project window.
Make a layout - adds a "print" button on the view button bar. Pressing this button will take the user through a series of dialog boxes and create a layout. The user will choose the sheet size, legend, scale, title, and subtitle. Finally, the user decides whether to print the map. A layout is saved for further manipulation or printing.
Calculate area or length - adds a "Calculator" button to calculate area, perimeter or acreage of polygon shape files, or length of line shape files. You must be able to write to the table. This operation will take time for large datasets, e.g. regional taxlot shapefile.
Field definition - adds a "Field Definition" choice to the bottom of the "Table" pulldown on the Table menu bar. Provides the definition of each field of a table (similar to the ITEMS command in Arc/Info).
Change attribute for labeling - adds an "ABC" button for changing the attribute used to label the active theme.
Select and delete all graphics - adds a choice at the bottom of the "Edit" pulldown menu. This choice deletes all graphics and labels from the view including the graphics attached to each theme so use with caution. If you want to remove the labels associated with a particular theme, use "Remove Labels" on the "Themes" pulldown.
Named extents - the "Named Extents" extension adds a new "Extents" menu that contains two choices: "Add Named Extent" and "Delete Named Extent." You use these choices to make or remove map extents you wish to keep. When you arrive at an extent that you may wish to revisit, use the "Add Named Extent" choice to save the extent with the name you specify. The new extent name appears in the "Extent" menu. To go to that extent, simply click on the choice labeled with the name. The named extents are saved with each individual view. If you open a new view, there will be no named extents associated with it. (Written by ESRI).
Labeling - this extension adds two tool menus to View GUIs, and one tool menu to Layout GUIs. These tool menus allow you to label individual features with labels that contain additional graphics like leaders, backgrounds, shadows or both. The icons for each tool indicate approximately what the result will be. For View GUIs, there are two tool menus, the first is for adding text that you must enter in the "Text Properties" window. The second tool menu contains tools that will label the feature of the active theme(s) that you click on. For the tools that create leaders, click on the feature you want to label and drag in the direction you want the label to appear. (Written by ESRI).
Intersect themes - adds a choice to the "Themes" pulldown menu which computes an intersection shapefile from 2 themes: an intersection theme (poly or line) and a overlay theme (poly). The output file has all the attributes of both themes for each intersection. Modeled after the ARC/INFO Intersection command. It takes time to intersect large themes, so use with caution.
Four environmental variables need to be set. The variables point to the locations of the various data which are used by MAGIC. They are:
RLISLITE1 - location of the Disk 1 RLIS Lite data, either on CD or hard disk. The location is the directory where the "boundary", "census", "land", etc. directories are located.
RLISLITE2 - this variable points to the Disk 2 RLIS Lite data ("environ","develop", and "water").
LOGOHOME - the path to the logos used by the layout extension. Place the north.tif and recycle.tif in this location.
USEREXT - location of the ArcView extensions. Place these files in this location:
Windows 95 users should set these variables in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, e.g. SET RLISLITE=E: After editing the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, you need to reboot to make the variables take effect.
Windows NT users set variables by double clicking on "system" in the control panel and selecting the "environment" tab.
UNIX users should set these variables in the .cshrc file, e.g. setenv RLISLITE /nfs/avdata1
Make sure you don't put a slash or backslash at the end of your path.
Clip RLIS Lite - makes a clipped version of RLIS Lite using a theme which the user selects.
Add Record Number - adds a menu choice to the "Theme" pulldown which adds a record number field to the table of an active theme.
Even though there is no support for these extensions, Metro may
be able to answer some questions regarding installation and
functionality. Being an unsupported product, the user uses these
extensions at their own risk.
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