Vector
The Vector toolbox holds ALIGN’s own tools for working with points, lines and polygons. These are the everyday operations of desktop GIS: buffering, clipping, dissolving, joining a table onto a boundary layer, extracting the features that match a condition.
Every tool takes one or two vector layers from your map, and writes its result as a new layer. Nothing is overwritten, so you can compare before and after, or run the same tool twice with different settings and keep both.
All 23 tools run in the page, on the layer’s own geometry. There is no waiting for a server and no upload.
The sub toolboxes
Section titled “The sub toolboxes”| Sub toolbox | What it is for | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Reshape a single layer: buffer, simplify, dissolve, build grids and coverage shapes. | 12 |
| Overlay | Combine two layers by their footprint: clip, intersect, subtract, merge. | 4 |
| Join | Bring attributes from another layer or table onto your features. | 2 |
| Select | Extract a subset of features into a new layer, by value or by location. | 2 |
| Movement & time | Analyse tracked positions: speeds, stops, encounters. | 3 |
In the panel itself the 23 tools appear as a single list in this same order, without the headings. The sub toolboxes above are how this documentation groups them, so you can read about the four or five tools that solve your problem rather than scroll through all of them.
Choosing the right tool
Section titled “Choosing the right tool”A few pairs are easy to confuse.
Simplify or Smooth? Simplify removes vertices and makes a shape lighter and more angular. Smooth adds vertices and rounds its corners. They are opposites.
Clip or Intersection? Both keep the overlapping area. Clip keeps the input layer’s attributes only, and is what you want to cut a layer to a study area. Intersection merges the attributes of both layers, and is what you want when the combination itself is the result.
Dissolve or Aggregate by attribute? Dissolve merges everything into one shape, optionally one shape per value of a field. Aggregate does the same grouping and also computes a summary statistic per group.
Select by location or Spatial join? Both compare two layers spatially. Select by location extracts features and changes nothing else. Spatial join keeps every input feature and adds the other layer’s attributes to it.
Reprojecting a layer
Section titled “Reprojecting a layer”Vector layers in the Map Builder are held in WGS 84. To reproject a layer to another coordinate system, use Projections and its Reproject Vector tool, which writes the result to the EPSG code you name.