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Depiction of roads and towns
Last updated
Last updated
MiniScale shows three classes of roads: A-Road with primary/non-primary styles and Motorway.
The primary (green) roads are the recommended through routes that complement the motorway system. Where there are significant lengths of dual carriageway, they have been shown with a dual carriageway style. The primary roads link primary route destination towns, which appear on green road signs. In congested urban areas, some roads have been omitted for clarity.
MiniScale settlements are shown in three levels: Primary route destination towns (large dot), other towns useful to the map (medium dot) and minor settlements (small dot).
Urban names have been given a range of point sizes and weights to visually differentiate them. No statistical relevance, such as size or population, should be inferred from this. Primary route destination names are all the same regardless of their physical size: thus, the hamlet of Scotch Corner appears the same on the map as a major town like Andover as these two settlements are both primary route destinations. Due to space issues, many suburban localities will be missing around major cities. The choice of which minor names we have space to show are weighted in favour of those that give context to the road network.
At the scale used for MiniScale it is impractical to show all the Welsh names with dual spellings (English and Welsh). However, the Illustrator file contains an extra layer of Welsh names that can be used to replace the English ones; this requires manual intervention since the Welsh names are in the same position as the English names.
Raster examples of MiniScale with shaded relief are provided to show what can be achieved with the Illustrator files. The relief file is embedded with individual 100 km shaded relief images fitted to the National Grid. These can be added to the main MiniScale map by using Illustrator’s ‘Paste in front’ option. Use the ‘multiply’ setting to control the transparency and strength of the shaded relief.
The resolution of the master vector Illustrator file is only limited by the output device.
The example raster files are at a resolution of 10 dots per mm (dpmm) or 254 dots per inch (dpi), and a pixel equates to 100 metres on the ground. This resolution maintains the necessary clarity of text for on screen use but is not considered suitable for high-quality printing.
