Another wishlist thing.

I'm doing a map of my town by tracing the centreline of the streets. There is a motorway, two B-roads, several A-roads and about a zillion other roads, streets, and country lanes. Basically the centreline is copied onto at least two other layers per type of road, these being the outline and the interior colour, and the ordering of the layers ensures that the interior line (centreline copy thickened to, say, 10pt) is on top of the (say 12pt) outline line, which produces a very satisfactory representation of a road on a map. but each kind of road (A-roads, B-roads, &c) gets treated slightly differently so that they look different.

This is all very well and looks jolly smashing - but as soon as I decide, later, that I want to extend the map to include a neighbouring village, I've got to go through the whole palaver again, for each kind of road.

I'd like to be able to have some sort of scripting language in terms of which I could, for example, give all A-road centrelines an "A" attribute, all B-roads a "B" attribute, &c, and the script language would then take that skeleton and create the necessary latyers and thicken the lines, &c &c, thereby producing a Xara file of a roadmap. If I then chose to extend the map, all I would have to do would be to add the extra lines, with appropriate attributes, and feed that extended skeleton to the script, which would redraw the whole thing again, as a roadmap, as defined by the script file.

Ok, so I could use a dedicated roadmapmaking drawing program. But I like Xara.

Does anyone else feel Xarascript would be useful?

Anton

PS. Why am I doing a map of my town when I've got a p[erfectly good printed one? Because I enjoy it! http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/rolleyes.gif