The ArcPad Team Blog

Unofficial stuff from the team behind the World's leading mobile GIS platform

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

QuickDraw in ArcPad


What is QuickDraw?
QuickDraw in ArcPad allows you to toggle between your existing, complex symbology and a coarse, black and white representation of your data. Using QuickDraw can give you a distraction-free editing environment and speed up the drawing of your map. Simplifying your symbology and showing less data will also help your project to run on low memory devices.  

Activating QuickDraw
QuickDraw can be activated by selecting the Blue Rocket on the Browse Toolbar. A small QuickDraw icon will appear in the lower left-hand corner of your screen to indicate that QuickDraw has been activated. When ArcPad is experiencing low memory issues, QuickDraw will be activated automatically as a memory saving measure.


QuickDraw Coarseness
QuickDraw Coarseness is set using a sliding scale in Advanced Settings on the Display Quality Tab. Left most on the scale is 'normal detail'. If the slide bar is moved all the way to the left, no change in resolution will be seen when QuickDraw is selected. As you move the slide bar to the right, the map resolution will become progressively coarser. E.g. As the slider moves one step to the right, the map will display at ½ the resolution, the next step displays at ¼ resolution etc.

The QuickDraw Coarseness Settings will be applied to all layers in the map that have QuickDraw set to ‘ON’.  


QuickDraw Settings for Each Layer
You can customise the QuickDraw Settings for each layer in the Table of Contents. The QuickDraw icon appears at the top of the column and the Default Settings are ‘OFF’ (empty checkbox) for the GPS Tracklog and Map Grid and ‘ON’ (black and white icon) for every other layer in the map. Tapping the checkbox next to GPS Tracklog and Map Grid will turn QuickDraw ‘ON’ for these layers. Tapping the checkbox next to any other layer in the map will turn QuickDraw ‘OFF’ (coloured icon) so that the layer will draw in full when QuickDraw is activated. Tapping the checkbox again (empty checkbox) means that the layer will NOT DRAW when QuickDraw is activated.

Layers selected for editing will be drawn in full when QuickDraw is activated.