A printable sheet about one to five things from a data item: arrange it, let the small maps show where they are, save it as a template, and export the PDF.
Open Hyz LayoutA layout is a printable sheet about a handful of things — one, and rarely more than five, drawn from a data item you already hold. It is a report you issue: these five inspection sites, this fibre route, that one parcel, with a map of them, the small maps that say where they are, their details, and the classification and reference number that make it a document rather than a picture.
That focus is the whole design. A sheet that tries to show a whole data item is a map, and Hyz Maps already does maps. A layout answers "what do I hand to someone about these particular things?"
It is its own product with its own address in the Portal: /layout. Everything that used to
live under a single map's design screen is here, and a map's old design URL now redirects to it.
Opening /layout with nothing selected shows the product's home, which answers the only two
questions you can have on arrival.
Start a layout lists every map and dashboard you own, newest first, each one opening the designer on it. Past six of them a search box appears. If you have neither yet, the page says so and points at Hyz Maps and Hyz Dashboards instead of showing an empty list.
Templates lists the arrangements you have saved — with the page size, the block count and the region count — plus the two sheets that ship with Haiyz. You can delete your own from here. There is deliberately no open button on a template: an arrangement needs a sheet to be applied to, so you apply one from inside the designer.
A subject supplies three things and nothing else: a frame (what a map block draws), facts (the title, the extent, the layer list, the selection) and a thumbnail. Anything that can supply those three can be laid out, so adding a subject is adding a resolver, not a new route.
You arrive with one of three:
/layout?dataset=…&features=…The subject the product is for. Open a data item and choose up to five of its features: the sheet is about exactly those. The map frames them, each gets a feature card, the small maps say which governorate and region they sit in, and the sheet titles itself — one feature names the sheet, several give the data item and a count.
The chosen features are in the URL, so a sheet is a link: the same five sites open the same sheet for a colleague, and the back button returns to the picker. The cap is applied on the way in too, so a hand-edited link asking for forty features still produces a sheet about five.
The picker reads the live layer, so Live Features edits and approved field records are all there, published or not. A data item with no Haiyz Layer yet is read from its stored file instead, which is frozen at upload.
/layout?map=…The live map. Map blocks photograph it at export, each at the extent it asks for, so one sheet can show the same map at several scales and the print is never a stale picture. The feature info block and map series work from the map's selection, which is how a sheet narrows to the few features it is really about.
/layout?dashboard=…The dashboard is opened out of sight, its widgets are given time to load, and every widget that can be drawn is photographed — maps and charts. Those pictures become picture blocks on the sheet. Indicators and selectors become real text — the number, or the value chosen on the selector — and every table and list becomes a page of its own after the pictures, its rows drawn as text by the export rather than photographed, with the rows the dashboard was showing when the page opened.
The page waits on each widget's own loading state rather than on a clock, and says how many it is still waiting for; a generous timeout exists only for a widget that never answers. Two things are reported rather than hidden:
A sheet is never silently incomplete. Anything left off it is counted and named, in the designer and again in the export result.
The sheet is divided into regions. A region is a rectangle that owns the blocks inside it, and the boundary between two regions prints as a rule — the thick black lines on a proper map sheet.
A layout stores its regions beside its blocks, so a template carries the structure it was drawn with and the library can say "2 regions". A page holds up to twelve.
Regions are an authoring structure, not a print primitive. What is stored, and what the export draws, is still a flat list of blocks positioned in millimetres — which is why every sheet saved before regions existed still prints unchanged, and why a layout with no regions is not a special case but one region the size of the page. The reasoning is in ADR-033.
Regions in the designer's toolbar shows them: a dashed outline and a name on each region, a line on every boundary two regions share, and two small controls in the middle of each. Drag a boundary and the regions on both sides of it resize together — the blocks inside follow, scaled to the new room, and a region stops at the smallest size that still holds its padding rather than folding away. The controls split a region down the middle into two columns or two rows. The page edge is paper, not a boundary: change the page size to move it.
Undo and Redo (⌘Z, ⇧⌘Z) step through everything you do to the sheet — a drag, a split, a block added or deleted, a template applied, an AI proposal applied — one step each.
A printed map sheet carries locator insets — the small maps in the rail that answer "where is this?". They show the administrative area the data actually sits in, not a fixed picture: the near one frames the governorate the features fall in, the far one their region.
The area is resolved from where the data is, so two sheets about two different sites show two different pairs of insets. Each inset draws its outline, the data as dots, and a red rectangle marking the main map's extent — a dot when that extent is too small to see.
frame |
Draws |
|---|---|
governorate |
The governorate containing the data |
region |
The region containing it |
country |
The national outline — the default, and what every sheet saved before this drew |
An instance needs reference geography for this: the administrative layers an administrator imports. Without them, or for data outside them, an inset falls back — a governorate to its region, a region to the country — so the sheet always prints. And the caption says it every time: reference geography, not an authoritative boundary.
All are A4 landscape, and all put one large picture in the biggest region with a rail of things that explain it — the shape of every printed map sheet anyone has ever handed across a desk. The first two are the owner's mockups; the other three answer "what do you want to print?"
| Sheet | What it is |
|---|---|
| Map sheet | A map with a rail: logo, two locator insets, the selected feature, the confidentiality line, scale and reference number |
| Report | A map over a band of locators and feature details, with the write-up down the side |
| Map + legend | The map with a slim rail: logo, legend, scale and reference number — what a quick report prints |
| Map + summary | A title band over the map, with the summary, the legend and the reference down the side |
| Compare two areas | Two maps side by side under one title; set each frame's extent to the area it shows |
Every map and dashboard on the /layout home carries a Quick report link. It opens the designer
on the Map + legend sheet and produces the PDF at once — one link, one printable sheet, nothing
designed. The designer stays open with the result, so what came out can be adjusted and exported
again. The same thing by address: /layout?map=…&starter=mapLegend&export=1 (any sheet id above
works as starter; without export=1 it only opens on that sheet).
Two things make them starting points rather than fixtures. Their geometry is a fraction of the page, so opening one on A3 gives the same sheet larger rather than an A4 arrangement adrift in a margin. And they are built against the subject: a dashboard's captures fill the picture frames, a map fills them live, and a block the subject cannot fill — a locator with no reference geography, a feature card with nothing selected — is left out rather than printed empty.
Everything they place is an ordinary region and an ordinary block, so the first thing you do is move one.
Save as template stores the arrangement — pages, regions and blocks — under an English and an Arabic title, with a Public switch. Private templates are yours alone; public ones anyone on Haiyz may apply. Templates… in the designer lists yours, the public ones, your organization's, and the five that ship, grouped.
A template stores an arrangement and never a map's data, layers or the subject it came from. Applying one replaces the current arrangement, and nothing is written until you press Save layout.
Deleting a template from /layout does not touch sheets already saved with it.
The Hyz AI button designs the sheet for you: pages, size and orientation, every block placed in millimetres, and Text blocks carrying real written analysis in your language built from your layer and field names, counts, ranges and distinct values.
Brief it as you would a colleague — "A4 landscape executive report with map, legend, summary and a written analysis". Extra context and Share 3 sample rows behave as they do everywhere else: with the switch off, only the schema leaves the platform.
It designs in regions: the answer tiles each page with named regions — a title band, the map, a rail — and places every block inside one, so a proposal has the same structure a sheet drawn by hand has, and the region tools work on it. A block the model drew past its region's edge is pulled inside; a proposal with no regions is asked for again, and if it still has none each page becomes one region you can split.
The answer arrives as a proposal loaded into the designer, regions and all. Apply keeps it as your working layout, still unsaved, and one Undo step back is the sheet you had before; Discard restores it outright. Blocks it could not place are counted and reported. The daily allowance is on Hyz AI.
Export captures each visible map block at its extent, sends the sheet with your logo, and returns a PDF. A block the composer cannot yet draw is named in the result.
What you can place on the sheet — every block type, page setup, the three extent modes, document numbers, map series and publishing a template to the Catalog — is the sheet reference.
/layout on its own is the library and the picker; the designer
opens on a map or a dashboard.