Adjust legend settings

You have quite a bit of control over the basic legend output.  General settings include the position of the legend (you specify the top/left corner only - the number of items and text labels will influence the height and width), the amount of space allocated to each legend entry (item height), and the spacing between legend items.  You can also specify how far over to the right the text labels are for each item, as well as the font size (your default font style will be used).  For map items, you can specify the rectangle size to use for displaying polygon items, or the size of the line (sets page width only - the line thickness is determined by the map properties).  For post maps, you can specify whether the legend should match the map symbol size, or override the size for a user-specified value (very useful if your symbols are very small on the map, but you want them larger for legibility in your legend).

Create legend

Click this button to start the legend creation process with the settings you have specified.  A dialog box (see image below) will come up for each basemap asking if it is line, polygon, point, or bitmap in order to ensure that the correct settings are applied.  When it's finished, you can leave it as is, or move items around as you please..

Step-by-step instructions:

1.  To start, double click the Legend Maker executable or shortcut.

A new instance of Surfer is opened, and the Legend Maker window appears at the top of your screen.  The Legend Maker window will always stay on top, so you can work on your Surfer plot and still see Legend Maker.  You must use the instance of Surfer that opened with Legend Maker to edit your legend.  You can make sure you are using the correct Surfer instance by looking at the title bar, which will say "Surfer with Legend Maker".  You may open plot documents, and perform other Surfer operations, but Legend Maker will always use the selected objects in the active window for processing.

2.  Adjust legend settings if desired, by clicking on the Settings button in the Legend Maker window.  Click "Ok" when finished, and the changes you made will be stored.

3.  Select all of the mapframes that contain items you would like included in the legend.

4.  Click the Legend button on the Legend Maker window, and your legend will be made.

5.  Adjust individual legend items as necesarry.

6.  When you are finished, close the Legend Maker window.  The Surfer instance that was opened with Legend Maker will automatically close as well.

Tips

The default settings will make a pretty decent legend for most situations.  The legend items/text labels are uncombined Surfer shapes, so you can easily move them around once your basic legend is created.  When you have the legend arranged how you like it, select all of the items and combine them, so you can hide the individual shapes in the Object Manager window.

You don't actually need to select precisely the mapframes you want to generate legends for.  If you select everything (Ctrl-A), Legend Maker will look for all available mapframes, skipping other items such as text or color scales.  Note that if any of the mapframes only contain "un-legendable" map types, the mapframe name may still be added to the legend, but with no sub-items or symbols.

Name all of your mapframes and overlays, since items will be labelled in the legend.  Don't just leave the default Surfer labels of "Map", "Base", etc.  Also, see next tip.

In order to ensure that basemap symbols are distinguished between line, polygon, symbol or bitmap types, a dialog box will pop up when a basemap is encountered.  The name of the theme is listed the dialog title bar.  Click the appropriate button to specify the theme type.  Example for a theme named "Topo":

Example

The following images were produced using Legend Maker with Surfer, and demonstrate the step-by-step process of creating a legend from a series of maps in your plot.

Here is a picture of a simple Surfer plot.

Now, here is a picture of the plot with the legend created by Legend Maker .