Choose a specific background for the islands

[francoisborel]

Good morning everyone,

I would like to know if this is possible. I'm on Windows with McIdas 1.6 and 1.7.
I want to make a viewpoint on the region of the Lesser Antilles, and save it like and gif picture with background transparent.
But i want to put a specific background for the islands (white color).

See the attached file. The border lines are white, but i want to fill the islands and south America in white color too.

Is it possible ?

Thank you a lot.

Cheers
françois

[bobc]

Hello, françois.

It isn't currently possible in McIDAS-V to fill map lines. We have adding this functionality written up as Inquiry 50, but I can't make any promises on when this will be done. My suggestion to you would be to search for a high resolution land-sea mask file. These land-sea mask files will have a value of 0 wherever there is water, and 1 wherever there is land (or vice versa). These netCDF files (assuming they are CF-compliant) can be read in through the General>Files/Directories chooser with the Grid Files data type. I've found a few land-sea mask files, but what I've seen so far hasn't been high enough resolution to see all of the islands. Once the land-sea mask data is displayed, you can set values of 0 (water) to be 100% transparent, and values of 1 (land) to be white.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this.

Thanks -
Bob Carp
McIDAS Help Desk

[francoisborel]

Hello Bob,

Thank you for all for your answer.

For information i have found a solution. I maked a map with McIdas, width black borders of islands and white background, and i saved it in a gif with transparence.
Then i put the picture in PowerPoint to have my blue background, and i used paint.net to complete my islands..

Here is the result.

Thank you again. Have a nice week.
françois