Customize Map Drawing Styles

Mapme provides styling options for lines and shapes, allowing you to create routes, highlight geographic areas, show direction, and make drawings stand out against the basemap.

To access these options, open the drawing layer you want to customize and expand Styling.

Color and Opacity

Customize the color and opacity of drawings in the layer. Select a preset color or use the color picker to choose your own.

Shape Customization

These options apply to shapes such as polygons, circles, countries, and administrative areas.

Shape Appearance

Choose how shapes are displayed:

• Filled: Displays the complete area using the layer color. You can also apply a fill pattern or add a thin border.
• Outline only: Hides the fill and displays the shape boundary as a line. Use Line customization to adjust its width, pattern, blur, and other properties.

Outline only is useful when you want to show a geographic boundary without covering the map underneath. For example, adding France from the Mapme Geo Library creates a shape representing the country. Select Outline only to display only France’s national border while keeping roads, labels, and other basemap details visible.

You can also use this option to display the boundaries of states, cities, neighborhoods, service areas, properties, or other custom regions.

The Shape appearance setting affects shapes only. Existing line drawings in the layer remain unchanged.

Shape Fill Pattern

Apply an image pattern, such as dots or stripes, to the inside of filled shapes. Patterns can help:

• Differentiate areas that use similar colors
• Make overlapping or adjacent regions easier to identify
• Improve accessibility for people with color-vision deficiencies
• Create a more distinctive visual style

For detailed instructions, see Enhance Your Interactive Maps with Image Patterns.

Shape Border

Enable Shape border to add a thin 1 px border around filled shapes. You can customize the border color, but its width is fixed.

For a thicker, dashed, patterned, or otherwise styled border, see How to Add a Custom Border Around Shapes.

Line Customization

Line customization applies to:

• Manually drawn lines
• Automatically generated path lines between locations
• The boundaries of shapes set to Outline only

Line Width

Control the thickness of lines:

• Default: 5 pixels
• Recommended range: 1–25 pixels
• Values above 25 pixels may appear disproportionate on most maps.

Path Outline

Add an outline around a line to make it stand out against the map background. Increase the value to make the outline more visible, or set it to 0 to disable it.

Line Blur

Soften the edges of a line to create a more diffused appearance:

• Default: 1
• Higher values create progressively softer lines.
• Blur can be useful for approximate routes, boundaries, or areas of influence.

Line Style Pattern

Apply an image pattern, such as arrows or dots, along a line. For example:

• Use arrows to indicate the direction of a route.
• Use different patterns to distinguish walking paths, cycling routes, transit lines, or other line types.

For detailed instructions, see Enhance Your Interactive Maps with Image Patterns.

Dash and Gap

Enable Dash and gap to create a dashed line. You can specify:

• Dash length: The length of each visible segment
• Gap length: The space between visible segments

Drawing Style Examples

• Interactive Route Styling Example
• Central Park Walking Paths

The map below shows three ways to display shapes:

1. Outline only: Displays only the shape boundary.
2. Filled: Displays the entire area using the layer color.
3. Custom border and fill: Uses separate layers to provide independent control over the border and fill.

Related Resources

• Draw Shapes and Lines
• Add a Custom Border Around Shapes
• Display Lines Between Markers
• Use Image Patterns in Drawings