Maps, Drawing & Export

01 The spatial editor

A GPU-accelerated map canvas that stays tied to your R objects.

Open it with the globe button in the toolbar. The map is MapLibre, so panning and zooming stay fluid over large vector data, and rasters are served as tiles by R itself rather than being flattened to a picture.

The important thing to understand: map layers are views onto R objects. A layer is not a copy of your data — it points at an object in your environment. Replace that object and the layer follows; delete it and the layer is invalidated.

Across the top of the panel is the ribbon. The Contents flyout holds your layer list. When you enter edit mode the ribbon is replaced by the geometry editing ribbon.

02 The map ribbon

03 Contents — the layer list

Your layers, topmost first. Empty, it reads No layers. Each row carries its own controls:

04 Basemaps

The Change basemap button opens the provider picker. Several providers work with no configuration; those requiring an access token read it from Settings → Basemaps.

The basemap is more than decoration — when you export a map to ggplot2 or tmap, the chosen provider is carried into the generated code via maptiles, so the exported figure has the same backdrop as the screen.

05 Vector symbology

Click a layer in Contents to open its symbology. What you can set depends on the geometry type, but the structure is the same throughout: pick a single style for the whole layer, or drive the style from a column.

Colour ramps

Continuous colouring uses a named scale. The built-in set:

06 Raster symbology

Raster layers get their own editor, opened the same way. Changes apply live — the tiles are re-rendered by R as you adjust, so you are looking at the real styling, not an approximation.

07 Labelling

Opened from the label button on a layer row. Grouped into sections:

08 Legend, north arrow and scale bar

The Map Settings menu on the ribbon toggles the Legend and North Arrow, each with a settings button for its own dialog.

These are not only screen decoration. Title, subtitle, caption, legend, north arrow, scale bar, graticules and panel border are all carried into exported map code, where they become real ggplot2 or tmap elements rather than being redrawn by hand.

09 Selection and identify

Selecting

Activate the selection tool on the ribbon and pick a mode:

A selection is more than a highlight — it becomes a scope. Toolbox tools offer Use only current view, which restricts the operation to the selected features and shows the slicing in the generated code.

Identify

Clicking a feature brings up its attributes in a popup. For newly drawn features, the attribute popup can be made to appear automatically — see Settings → Spatial Editor → Drawing → Attribute popup for new features.

Query by attribute

Selection is not limited to clicking. A selection query dialog builds an attribute expression to select by — the map equivalent of the toolbox’s condition builder.

10 Drawing and geometry editing

Digitizing built to CAD conventions — snapping, typed coordinates, true curves.

Enter Edit Mode swaps the ribbon for the geometry editing ribbon. Until you pick a feature it prompts Edit Mode — click a feature on the map.

Modes

Segment and shape tools

The Choose tool control picks what the next click lays down. Segment type switches between straight and curve construction.

Snapping

Toggle snapping turns it on and off; Snapping options opens the Snap to list. Snapping works across every visible layer and the shape you are currently drawing, backed by a spatial index so it stays instant over dense data.

Priority runs vertex > intersection > midpoint > edge, so the most meaningful target wins when several are in range.

Precise input — Distance & Bearing

An entry box in the ribbon takes typed coordinates instead of clicks, in the format lng,lat · d100 a45:

# Absolute coordinate
-122.42, 37.77

# Relative: 150 m at 45° clockwise from north, from the last vertex
d150 a45

For a whole traverse there is a tool of its own. Distance & Bearing (B) opens a docked strip: say where you are measuring from, then enter each course in the notation your notes are already written in.

Finishing and undoing

11 Exporting a map

The Export menu on the ribbon has three destinations.

Export to IMG

Renders the map to an image file. Choose Format, Size, Directory and File, then Export. The map is re-rendered at the size you ask for rather than screenshotted, so the output is publication resolution.

Export to ggplot / Export to Tmap

The interesting ones: instead of an image, you get the R code that draws your map.

ouRGeo reads your on-screen map — layers, symbology, labels, legend, north arrow, scale bar, graticules, titles — and generates complete, standalone ggplot2 or tmap code that reproduces it. Run it, edit it, put it in a paper’s supplementary material, drop it into an R Markdown document.

• Vector layers become the matching geoms with your fills, colours, widths and scales.
• Raster layers keep their on-map symbology — geom_spatraster with a matching scale_fill_gradientn(), or geom_spatraster_rgb() for RGB composites; tm_raster with the equivalent tmap scale.
• Basemaps are emitted via maptiles.
• Annotations — title, subtitle, caption, legend, north arrow, scale bar, graticules and panel border — are written as real elements, and can be overridden in the dialog before generating.