Map Tab — Focus+ Mode

Focus+ is the third map mode, alongside Regular and Focus. Instead of showing the scrolling tile map, it draws the countries and regions you select as clean shapes through a map projection — a projection being a cartographer's method for flattening the globe, the look you know from an atlas or an annual report. The result reads as a designed graphic rather than a screenshot, which makes Focus+ the mode of choice for deck pages like a multi-country footprint, a projected world map, or a US map with Alaska and Hawaii shown as insets.

Switch to it with the Focus+ button on the mode toggle at the top of the Map panel (Base Map | Focus Map | Focus+). On a standard (Mercator) projection, Focus+ opens on the view you were just looking at — your zoom and position carry in, and carry back out again when you leave. With nothing selected it shows the whole world; pick countries or regions to narrow the view. The mode is labeled experimental, and it's also the only place in pitchmappr that can export a true vector SVG.

Focus+ or Focus Mode? Focus Mode keeps the real base map and masks everything outside one country — use it when you want genuine geography (terrain, roads, city detail) behind your data. Focus+ redraws the geography itself — use it when you want a flat presentation-style map, more than one country at once, a specific projection, or an SVG you can edit in Illustrator or Figma.

Getting around

Focus+ doesn't use zoom levels like the tile map — it scales the projection. ×1 is the fitted view (your selection framed in the canvas), and you can zoom between 0.4× and 6×. The status strip at the bottom of the map shows the current factor (e.g. "1.3×") where the other modes show a zoom level; the cursor's coordinates still read out as normal.

Panning and zooming here are for composing the view on screen — they aren't saved with the project. Zooming stays smooth even at the highest detail level: while a gesture is in progress the map reuses its last full render, then redraws at full quality the moment you stop.

A few tile-map controls don't apply in Focus+: the rail's search (it flies the tile map to a place, which has no meaning on the projection canvas), Place a pin, and the radius tool — create pins and rings in Regular or Focus mode instead (rings you've already made still display here, see Your data in Focus+). The rotation padlock on the rail is greyed out too: rotation applies to the tile map, not the Focus+ projection.

Resolution & Projection

The first section of the Map panel in Focus+ holds the two foundational choices — which projection to draw through, and how detailed the borders are. Everything else in the mode renders on top of these.

Theme

Primary Regions

The primary is the subject of your map — what the projection is fitted to and what your styling emphasizes.

Primary Internal Region

Internal regions are the subdivisions inside your primary — states and provinces inside a country, or counties inside a US state.

Secondary Regions

Secondary regions are the surrounding context — the geography drawn behind and around your primary, styled to recede.

Secondary Internal Region

Geographic Labels

Focus+ can label the geography itself — country names, region names, and secondary region names — each with its own on/off toggle. The text formatting (font, size, colors) is shared across all three label types for now, and the same style block appears under whichever toggle you open.

Primary Country Names

Primary Region Names

Secondary Region Names

Label style

Shared by all three label types: Font (System, Sans-serif, Serif, Condensed, Monospace), Style (Regular, Bold, Italic), Size (7–32px), Text color, Halo color, and Halo width — the halo is the outline behind the text that keeps labels readable over fills and borders.

Additional Layers

Extra layers drawn with the projection. The base map, roads, and highway shields come from the real tile map, so they're only available when the projection is Web Mercator — in any other projection those toggles are greyed out with a note (switch the Projection dropdown to Mercator to enable them; with a North American selection, remember Auto resolves to Albers, so pick Mercator explicitly).

Base Map

The first item under Additional Layers puts the real tile base map underneath your Focus+ map, so the drawn shapes sit on genuine geography — streets, terrain, water — instead of a plain background. The tiles stay perfectly aligned with the projection as you pan and zoom.

While the base map is showing, Transparent background export is unavailable — the base map is the background (see Exporting from Focus+).

Roads

Road styling (line thickness, color) currently follows the base map's road styling — the panel notes that dedicated controls are coming.

Highway Shields

Local Cities

Reference city markers and names inside your selection, so viewers can orient themselves. These are separate from your data markers and have their own styling.

Your data in Focus+

Your project data renders on the Focus+ map just as it does elsewhere:

• Markers and labels — every visible dataset's markers and labels draw on the projection, honoring per-dataset visibility and stacking order from the Markers & Labels panel.
• Radius circles — rings you've created show in Focus+, re-projected and panning/zooming with the view. Create and edit them in Regular or Focus mode (the tool popover isn't available here) — see Radius circles.
• Demographics layers — shaded map layers from the Demographics panel render in Focus+, clipped to your selection. Each layer's Show on secondary regions toggle controls whether the shading extends beyond the primary onto the secondary geography.
• Energy layers — layers from the Energy panel render in Focus+ too, with per-layer Show beyond focus region and Show on secondary regions toggles. The one exception is Energy Transfer's vector-tile layers, which come straight from that operator's map tiles: they appear on the tile map and standard exports but not in Focus+, and the panel notes this on the affected layers.

Exporting from Focus+

Exports use the same Export panel as the other modes — Quick Export captures exactly what you see. Focus+ adds one format the rest of the app doesn't have, and changes what a couple of options mean.

The other export options — the marker & label size slider, the Legend (a separate file), and the Footer credit line — work in Focus+ exactly as described on the Export panel page.

Troubleshooting