Fluidly integrates GIS and CAD environments 
Albion is a unique blend of CAD and GIS technologies. Work with your GIS data in a medium that is efficient and easy to master.
Built for large drawings
Albion was built from the ground up to handle large drawings. It uses sophisticated memory management techniques to utilize all the horsepower that you paid for in your PC.
Clean, consistent interface
You will not need to buy a book in order to learn how to use the software. Hover the mouse over nearly any control and you will be presented with explanative information.
DWG, DXF import / export
Exchange drawings with the industry standard DWG/DXF up to version 2007.
Large raster support
Albion comes standard with the ability to read MrSid, ECW, Jpeg2000, Tiff, and Jpeg as large rasters. PNG, GIF, and BMP are supported for smaller images. Large rasters are proper drawing objects, and can thus be manipulated just like other objects (moved around, scaled, etc). Image transparency, contrast, and brightness can be adjusted realtime. Bring any number of georeferenced images into a drawing simply by dragging them in from Explorer.
Painless Layer Management 
Manage large numbers of layers by grouping them into categories, then turn those entire sets on and off with one click.
Control layers en masse across all your paper space layouts from a single tool.
Layer Order Determines Draw Order
Layer order implicitly controls the order in which objects are drawn.
True Color support with Transparency
Use the full range of the color spectrum, and use translucent colors anywhere you like.
Vector hatch fills
Draw complex, colored hatch patterns using existing CAD objects. Vector hatches are effectively like having a block symbol repeat itself over a surface.
Bitmap hatch fills
Use any type of bitmap (including bitmaps with transparent areas) to define hatch fills.
Hatches are implicitly associative
The fill style is an inalienable property of a circle and of a closed polygon. Thus, hatches are always 'associative'.
Point + Click editing
CAD and GIS objects can be manipulate easily and intuitively with the mouse. If necessary, precise control is always available.
Advanced Polygon Operations
Booleans - Perform polygon boolean operations, such as creating a shape where two polygons intersect, or subtract one area from another.
Buffer - Create a region surrounding, or nested within any other geometry.
Simplify - Use a tolerance to simplify unnecessarily complex geometries.
Standard CAD/GIS Modification Tools
- Move, Scale, Rotate
- Cut, Copy, Paste
- Move To Layer, Copy To Layer
- Clone
- Chamfer
- Explode
- Mirror
- Break
- Trim
- Align
- Find Text, Replace Text
Cleanup Tools
- Extract closed polygons out of archaic drawings containing only disconnected lines.
- Remove, or just analyse duplicate objects.
- Convert articulated polylines back to arcs.
- Fix a drawing to two known points.
- Reverse engineer exploded symbols, into scaled and rotated symbol inserts.
- Painlessly join thousands of unconnected lines into polylines or closed polygons.
Selection Filter
Use the selection filter to find geometry and text objects that match your exact criteria.
Powerful Saved Selections
Save any CAD or GIS selection to a named selection, then combine them by adding, subtracting, intersecting, or finding the disjoint set. This gives you the power to combine primitive analysis tools in special ways.
Snaps
- Use a wide variety of snap modes, all in realtime.
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Snap modes include Vertex, Edge, Grid, Midpoint, Center, Insertion Point, Intersection, Tangent, Perpendicular, Rotation, Polar.
- Create temporary snap points while any command is busy.
- Select filled objects by clicking inside them, not on their edges.
Objects
Lines, Polylines, Multipart Polylines, Filled Polygons, Hatches (ie Compound polygons with holes and islands), Circles, Arcs, Points, Block Inserts (ie Symbols), Text, Bitmaps (small or large), Arrows, and more.
Render To Bitmap
Render a drawing or a paper sheet to a high resolution TIFF or JPEG bitmap.
Geographic Projection 
Project, Reproject, or Unproject geometry to and from Transverse Mercator or UTM.
64-Bit
Albion is one of the first GIS applications to support 64-bit operating systems. This allows you to work with gigantic data sets, provided you have the RAM. It is almost always true that "RAM has never been cheaper". It is certainly true now, in 2008.
GIS
Seamless CAD+GIS operation
GIS objects appear in your drawing just like regular CAD objects. You can use a trimmed set of standard CAD commands to manipulate GIS features, in the exact same manner that you manipulate CAD objects.
Fluid workflow: Only commit data when you are finished 
Most GIS packages force one to enter 'Editing' mode, and once done, to decide whether you want to commit those changes to the dataset, or discard them. Albion GIS has no such restrictions. You work on your data until you are satisfied, and then only is your data saved when you click File/Save.
Complete Undo for GIS Operations
Work on your GIS data naturally and without undue hesitation. Even if your edits go too far, they are never saved to the database until you explicitly press Save.
Edit Joined Tables
No other GIS or database application allows this: You can edit data in joined tables. If you edit data in one of the underlying tables used to produce the join, the joined table is automatically rebuilt, if necessary. Use the full gamut of database joins: Inner, Left Outer, Right Outer, Full Outer.
Write Text Labels Scripts in Lua
Lua is a remarkable simple and easy to learn language. It can be used inside Albion GIS to create complex text labels. There is really no limit to what you can create if you can afford the time to learn the language beyond the rudiments.
Manipulate Databases using Lua 
Right from inside the Data Grid Editor, you can run a Lua script at any time to compute values in fields. If you make a mistake, simply hit Undo.
Render by Category, Numeric Range, or SQL Expression
CAD-to-GIS
Easily add CAD objects to existing GIS data, or create new GIS data from scratch out of a set of CAD objects.
GIS-to-CAD
There is virtually no effort in going from GIS to CAD. All it entails is a click to File > Save Drawing.
Use spatial lookups to bind CAD text to GIS features
Intelligently associate CAD text with GIS features, or perform spatial lookups from one GIS layer to another.
Databases Supported:
Shapefile, DBF, AVDB
DTM
Fast and Accurate Delaunay Triangulation
Triangulate a million points in a minute or less. Load irregular or regular points to create a DTM object.
Generate Contours to CAD vectors or GIS polylines
Built-in DTM contouring facilities with optional height labels and major/minor lines.
Generate Spot Heights
Place text objects at arbitrary locations, showing the height at that point.
Extendible
Write quick scripts in ruby
Ruby is a simple and popular scripting language that can be used from inside Albion to create objects, alter text, extract coordinates, move objects around, or do virtually anything else that you would otherwise have to do by hand.
Write high-performance plugins in C++
The prove the point that Albion is highly extendible, the entire GIS mechanism is written as a plugin, utilizing the same architecture that is available to all third party developers. Please contact us if you are interested.
Printing
Paper Spaces
Create an unlimited number of paper space layouts.
Map Books
Sophisticated Map Book system for quickly generating hundreds of pages on a grid layout. Define a single paper space template from which all the pages are built. Use intelligent objects in paper space to automatically label grid references.
PDF
A built-in, custom PDF engine generates the highest quality PDF files, without requiring Adobe Acrobat Professional, or an equivalent PDF printer driver. Utilizing a native PDF engine results in the best possible PDF quality and size. Combine hundreds of pages into a single PDF without any effort, or produce individual PDF files for each page.
