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Creating the Graphic for the Map - Step 1

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Sat, 01/28/2012 - 10:27 — Barb
Theatre map graphics or pictures are not required if reserved seating will be sold non-graphically (this is not common) or if the venue is used for festival or traveling troupe ticket sales. If the intention is to sell reserved seats visually, a graphic representation of the theatre will need to be drawn in a graphic application and then placed into Theatre Manager. At this time, Arts Management recommends using a PowerPoint slide to draw the graphic image as it allows for small file size, and images can be saved in the correct format for both PC and Mac use.

Optimizing Graphic Map Size

Use vector based graphics (lines, squares, circles, letters, colour, etc) on your maps and do not use picture/image files (jpegs, tiffs, bitmaps, etc) or high bit depth (shadings and transparency) in order to minimize the size of the final graphic. Think simple - the graphic map that sits behind the seat squares does not need to be an elaborate representation of the venue. The purpose is to allow patrons to easily visualize the sections/zones within the venue.

You can do a fantastic map with lines circles and colour using vector graphics and the file size will be 50K +/-. Adding a picture can jump the size to a megabyte without trying. Smaller file sizes result in faster performance transferring the maps from the database and building the suggested seat graphics for the web. Theatre Manager limits the graphic map file size to less than 500kb for PC's, less than 200kb for Mac's. Less is more.

For Windows The picture must be saved as a Windows Meta File (WMF) in a Windows environment (PowerPoint will do this). Drawing applications like Corel Draw can create WMF files - but be mindful of the file size. It's much easier for things to get "out of hand" in a drawing application than in PowerPoint. The Metafile must be placed in Theatre Manager on a Windows machine and must be smaller than 500kb in order to be read properly.
For Mac

For Macintosh the file should be saved as a PICT file. Microsoft Office X - PowerPoint for Mac can save as a PICT file. Drawing applications like MacPaint or PC-Paintbrush can also create PICT files. The PICT file must be placed in Theatre Manager on a Macintosh machine and must be smaller than 200kb in order to be read properly.

If you are using PowerPoint for Mac to create your pict files, use version 8 or previous. PowerPoint ver. 10 picts have changed and will not display.