1.) In RM7, I generally include the Lat. and Long. of Place Details. My convention has been to group Place Details by city areas/neighborhoods. For instance, Philadelphia (which has over 100 areas), and I typically provide areas with names as “Philadelphia City (Northern Liberties area), Philadelphia Co., PA”, and “Philadelphia City (Kingsessing area), Philadelphia Co., PA”. This allows all places in Philadelphia to appear in alphabetical order.
Under Places|Mapping - How do you select more than one place for mapping? Holding down a key (Shift?, Ctrl?, Alt?) while mouse clicking on more than one place doesn’t seem to work as it does in other applications. I want to see ALL Place Details mapped when more than one Place is selected.
2.) How do you prevent RM from wanting to place a marker at City Hall (or whatever the centroid of a place may be)? Some neighborhoods/areas are several miles away from City Hall, and to have that “centroid” mapped with a blue bubble is nonsense. Even deleting the latitude and longitude does not appear to work. RM will still attempt to place a blue bubble there, calling it by the neighborhood name. NOT ACCEPTABLE. I detest the ‘dumbing down’ of geographic information in this manner. THAT is apparently an old problem.
3.) I use Google Earth Pro (GEP) to determine a latitude and longitude for a Place Detail, using GEP pushpin in their mapping. Then I enter the GEP lat. and long. into RM8 (after padding additional spaces into the fields in RM8), so that RM8 can place its blue bubbles. Why should anyone have to do this?
Has anyone noticed that over time (OK, 10 years or more), the GEP pushpin cross hairs (and thus presumably the RM blue bubbles) tend to drift? This is apparently a phenomenon caused by plate tectonics called “continental drift”, with Europe (where the Zero/Greenwich meridian is located) moving further away from North America. RM is not the only vendor that avails itself of lat. and long. capabilities. BillionGraves and FindAGrave are others. What, if anything, can be done to overcome this? Of what use is it to even provide this capability if the blue bubbles drift to the wrong place over time, and fall upon a neighbor’s property/building 100 years from now? Keep in mind that a Philadelphia row home can be as little as 15 feet wide. Is their any way of locking lat. and long. in North America AS IT EXISTED ON A SPECIFIC DATE such that the bubbles will never drift?
It may be beyond the capabilities to provide a meaningful software solution to Issue No. 3 (except perhaps to label me with “nit-picking”). BUT, most software, including RM, provides an ability to enter latitude and longitude to the 1/100th of a second. That is to within approx. 1.01 feet on the ground (between all parallels of latitude) and up to approx. 1.01 feet on the ground (meridian longitude spacing varies, with zero spacing at the poles). The point MAY BE this. If continental drift that can easily approach that value in a short time period, and a variety of other issues can be responsible for more significant variations, then what is the point of allowing entry of lat. and long. to 0.01 second? What should the casual RM user be expected to understand about such faux accuracy?
Here it is, 4 months later, and issue No. 2 as described above has not been addressed. It appears the some place details have 2 lat/long assignments (one at the proper place, one improperly placed at the municipal centroid (City Hall in Philadelphia’s case)). The lat/long for the improper place cannot be deleted. Why is that? Some of the place details in some of the city neighborhoods do not suffer from this shortcoming. of having two place dots, but other places in other neighborhoods do suffer from this . FIX THIS, and some other issues, and I may ultimately be tempted to migrate from RM7 to RM8. Otherwise, my efforts continue in RM7.
I really don’t see your issue No. 2 problem. I regularly change the location of the blue dot that RM shows which as you say is located at the centre of the relevant political jurisdiction. Lots of mine end up in a field somewhere as I am mainly dealing with English villages. I prefer my blue dot to be in the centre of the village not in a field. I have never had a problem deleting the coordinates provided by RM and replacing them with my preferred coordinates. Where I have Place details such as a street, church, school, cemetery etc. I take the coordinates from OpenStreetMap which is the same map data that RM uses and add these. My map of the Place now shows a blue dot for the centre and one for each Place detail (church, school etc.) I can if I wish delete the coordinates of the Place just retaining those for the Place details. This will remove the blue dot from the centre. It will of course reappear (back in the field) if I use the Geocode all places option. What exactly do you want “fixing”?
A solution to this problem is needed. Here is my e-mail address again: rockveley@aol.com. If someone wants to tackle this, I will attach the rmtree file to an e-mail, provided I have someplace to send it, and my gratitude will be noted if the solution/fix is found. Did I miss a memo that describes some other means of sharing an rmtree file (or any other sort of file) with others? Aside from getting the RM8 creators to address it (four months have provided plenty of opportunity to monitor their forums)?