Labeling the galactic map: You're some years into a game. You've explored a fair bit and are now expanding into known space. Your Galactic map is getting crowded and you want a immediate visual indication of what system are important, and for what reasons.
Let's slap down some labels. Go to Galactic Map->left-side tabs->Map Labels. Press the "New Label" button and a label, named "New Label" appear at the upper-right of the Galactic map (if not visible, scroll up and to the left). As a demonstration for yourself of the power of this feature so kindly provided by Steve, please try the following out:
1. Name your new label "Mining". (click on the label, type in the box, press the "Update Text" button)
2. Create another label. Rename it to a special symbol. See the bottom of this post for the nitty-gritty on special symbols, but we'll just use an asterisk for now to keep this section brief. Press the "Update Text" button to make the change. An asterisk is way too small, so we'll hit "Change Font" and set the size to 36. Move the asterisk near the "Mining" label to start setting up your map legend. Make sure it is away from the system icons. Change the color of the asterisk to red using "Change Font".
3. On the galactic map, click on the asterisk to make sure that this label is selected. See the asterisk in the Map Labels window. Press "Copy Label"; move the copy to one of your mining systems. If you place the asterisk fully within a system icon, and later want to move or change it, you will select the system instead. Labels appear on top of systems, but system icons are selected first. So either place the system offset from the system icon or be OK with moving the system in order to change the label.
You may multiply symbols to your heart's content. I currently have symbols that indicate mining, population, and defence priorities, which helps me stay focused on my long-term strategies.
Labeling ground forces: You want a well-organized army. You'd like battalions, divisions, army groups, etc. to each have easy-to-see short labels so you you know a bunch about the unit even before you click on it. We have a bunch of ways to do this, and we'll walk through a couple of them.
1. We are likely to want units of battalion size in our army. NATO map symbology uses a "||" to indicate a unit of this size. Open up the Ground Forces window, click on the "Formation Templates" tab, and press the "New" button at the bottom of the window. For a full name, in "Infantry Battalion" and press OK. Now we are asked for a short name. Type in "INF ||". We now have the beginnings of a simple, but easy-to-recognize method of labeling ground units.
2. We'd like to extend this, but we quickly discover that the usual keyboard characters don't really fit the bill. We can label a division just fine, but what about a corps ? How about teams, task forces, combat commands, and so forth that we might want to tailor to a specific task or leader? Here, Unicode characters come to the rescue. I have a library of special character that I currently use for every size of unit, all the way from battalions to armies a million in size. See below for instructions on using Unicode in Aurora. Briefly: In your usual word-processing software, try setting the font to something like Arial, and type the character or alt+# code indicated.
| Company
|| Battalion
||| Regiment
+8226 Brigade (a single black dot)
: Division
+8942 Corps (vertical ellipsis)
+8286 Army (four vertical dots)
+1422 Army group, Front, or supreme command (zero width joiner symbol)
+9674 Team, task force, or anything between a battalion and a brigade in size (lozenge)
+8224 Combat Command, or whatever force you want between a brigade and a division in size (a single dagger)
+8225 Battlegroup, or whatever force you want between a division and a corps in size (a double dagger)
Windows' Character Map program and the notes that follow will help you find and use symbols appropriate for your own armies.
Special Symbols and Aurora: Aurora includes wide-character support, which means that you can use lots of non-ASCII letters and symbols to dress up labels. This is font and localization-dependent, and so this guide gives you the tools to take off on your own. The following comments were written on a machine using the English-United States localisation, with Aurora running under Windows 10.
Special symbols are great, so we're going to actually take 5 minutes and get good with them. Go to the Windows Start Menu, type in "character map", and launch the Character Map app. While Aurora seems to use MS San Serif on the test machine, go ahead and choose the Arial font. Also, select "Advanced view". Make sure Character set is Unicode. Find "Go to Unicode:" and type in 0580. If you see a pair of round symbols near the middle of the first row, we're off to the races. If you don't, Go to Unicode: 0 and choose an asterisk (*).
Either way, every Unicode character has a code, and you'll want to record the codes of your favorite symbols. Character Map displays this ocde in hexadecimal, but you access Unicode characters by holding down the alt key and typing in a decimal number. Convert hexadecimal to decimal using a calculator (one options is at
https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/math/hex-to-decimal.php). You can use a variety of word processing tools to accept and save the symbols you type (OpenOffice and WordPad being two), just don't use a limited app like MS Notepad.
Let's get going! Back to Character Map. In Unicode position 058D (or 2A for asterisk) is the symbol we'll use. Convert 058D to decimal, and we get 1422. Alt+1422 gets you this symbol on anything that's Unicode-friendly (On a regular keyboard hold down Alt and type 1422 on your number pad. On a laptop, hold down the Fn and Alt keys, and type in 1422). Now, we can't do this directly in Aurora (On the test machine, anyway. Dunno why.), so we'll do it in Character Map (or our word-processing software), then copy-and-paste into Aurora's Map Label window. This is another good reason to keep a library of favorite symbols.
