I am happy to announce the release of version 2.70 of PlanetGIS. This release introduces call-outs & sticky coordinates, searching for labels, improvements to floating objects and addresses a number of minor bugs and feature requests. Version 2.70 (or later) will be required to prepare maps for PlanetGIS 3.0 (due out soon!). You will find the updates here.

Call-outs are similar to floating objects except that they have a geographic anchor point. Call-outs can contain the same content as floating objects, e.g. images, tables, etc. and are created exactly like floating objects. They can look like speech bubbles, or like floating objects with a tether line or arrow linking it to a geographic position.

Sticky coordinates is an option that can be activated for editing features that share vertices or boundaries. Whenever a vertex is moved, vertices of neighbouring features that are at the same location will also be moved. Also, when you create a new vertex on a boundary (for instance to introduce a bend) other features with the same boundary will also get a new vertex.

Finally, version 2.70 has an additional compression format that squeezes out another 10%, but does not accept alphanumeric keys. Non-numeric keys will be changed to a label and a numeric GID assigned. If you have features with non-numeric keys, their keys need to be written to a table. (More about this later: this is only an issue when upgrading to 3.0). The new compression format (.fcz) is compatible with PlanetGIS 3.0, which stores additional information like 3-D coordinates, feature orientation, text alignment, history, user checkouts and modification tracking, etc. .Fcz files will be the medium of (two-way) data exchange between PlanetGIS 2.x and PlanetGIS 3.x.