User:Dom0803/Sandbox

DO NOT EDIT THIS, THANK YOU

A Locator map is a dynamic map which comprises of an image background as a map, and a foreground image which is a red dot pinpointing the location of the desired town or city on the map. Beside the red dot is the name of the location. To the right you can see the Ireland locator map I have created, showing the location of Belfast, Northern Ireland. Creating a locator map may seem complex when you see the code, but it's quite simple once you understand it. Hopefully by the end of this article you will be a discerned location mapper and will be able to create and use the locator map confidently. The coding for the locator map is not yet 100% completed, and it doesn't handle longitude properly for maps crossing the +/- 180 meridian yet. The locator map was created by Zocky

How the locator map works
For this page I will be using the Ireland locator map as my example. The locator map works on a user defined grid reference. Let's take a look at the string that makes up the Ireland locator map, and the code that makes up the initial template required by wikipedia to use the locator map code on the wikiarticle. The locator map works like a real world three figure grid map. Well, quite similar. Instead of using co-ordinates like NNN, NNN number it uses one co-ords from Multimap, one number to two decimal places; NN.NN NN.NN

The locator map's source-code uses the numbers you have input from multimap to determine where the red dot will be places in reference to your provided co-ords on the source code, that are the most northernly, southernly, westernly, and easternly points visible on the template map image.

I'll use the grid beside to show an example of how the grid system works in relative to Belfast, and the Irish co-ords. Note: The orange grid lines have been drawen on to give an idea of how the template-text uses the defined location co-ord. They are only rough drawings, and the entire grid is not drawen to accurate measurements, but should give you a fair idea. Here's the template text that has been used in this article to display the template map: Text used to impliment map into this article: Text that is in the template map source-code: see Location map

In the image I have used the relative co-ords. Belfast's co-ords as seen in the impliment text is lat=54.59, long=-5.93 (lat-latitude:long-longtitude) and if you look on the map you will see that the orange lines drawen on (for lat) are rounded to .5. As the Belfast lat is 54.59 this is just off the .5 line. Study the example image and you should be able to figure out how it works. To learn further how to work grid references follow this link. Ordnancesurvey.co.uk (.PDF)


 * DELME

Template:Location map Ireland template ireland wiki location map wiki