I am trying again to understand control of map elements, independent of the standard map header. For now just considering scale-bars and north-arrows. The Therion Book, page 70 says… North arrow and scale bar may be displayed using * \ifnortharrow ▷ conditional; true if map projection is plan and symbol north-arrow is not hidden in layout * \ifscalebar ▷ conditional; true if scalebar is not hidden
From this, I assume that the following statements in a layout should prevent a north-arrow and scale-bar from being output.
symbol-hide special north-arrow symbol-hide special scale-bar However I find that these elements are always output regardless of the layout. ie the symbol-hide statements have no effect for the special symbols, even though they work just fine for groups, lines and points. This is an example of what I am using; \def\maplayout{ \legendbox{100}{100}{NW}{\the\legendcontent} %insert default header with cave name, northarrow, scalebar, statistics etc \legendbox{17}{00}{N}{\northarrow } %insert just a northarrow \legendbox{17}{-100}{N}{\scalebar} %insert just a scalebar } I have also tried the likes of ; \legendbox{17}{-100}{N}{\ifscalebar\scalebar\fi } %try to insert a scalebar only if not hidden But this does not work either, as the scale-bar is still always output regardless of symbol-hide. Am I misunderstanding the usage of symbol-hide for special symbols, or have I broken something, or could there be a bug? Bruce