Clone

The Clone Polygon tool allows you to create a polygon by copying an existing one (or more). When you click the button Earthlight goes into the Clone Polygon mode. When you click a polygon on the map it is copied into the currently edited record. This is shown by a yellow polygon. You can deselect a polygon by clicking it again and the yellow polygon will disappear. You can easily select multiple polygons by clicking each one in turn. If you know that all your polygons will be from one layer then you could, if necessary, set only that one to be selectable (from the layer properties dialog).

How to use the Clone tool

The Clone tool allows you to create a geometry by copying an existing one (or more).

1. Select the correct layer to be edited.
2. Choose Clone tool to activate cloning mode.
3. (*) Click the geometry you want to clone.
4. (*) Next click Clone record (your geometry should be highlighted in yellow).
   
5. Your geometry is cloned exactly in the same place as the original one.
6. Now simply uncheck Clone tool and Save your cloned geometry.

(*) – if you want to clone more than one geometry, you have to repeat steps 3 and 4 for all geometries that should be cloned (when you clone several objects they will be cloned as one geometry).

Cloning geometries between layers

1. If you want to clone geometry from different layer, you just need to specify which layer is your target layer (the layer that selected geometry should be cloned into). Select it.
2. Choose Clone tool to enter the cloning mode.
3. Select the geometry from the different layer (in the example the right rectangle is from "Polygon layer" layer, and it will be cloned into "GeometryCollection" layer).
4. Click Clone record.

The rest of the steps is described above.

Merging different geometries using Clone tool

Only geometries from the same record can be merged so it is necessary to use the Clone tool to copy geometries from different records into one.

1. Select a layer with geometries.
2. Click Clone tool.
3. Select the 1st geometry.
4. Click Clone record.
5. Select the 2nd geometry.
6. Click Clone record once more. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each geometry you want to merge. In the end all the geometries for merging should be highlighted in yellow.
7. Click Merge tool.
   
8. Uncheck Clone tool by clicking on Grab tool.
9. Save changes.
   

It’s important to remember, that the records aren’t actually merged. They are exactly the same as before. The only change is that a new record was created by the cloning process and it contains all the cloned geometries merged together. The new record may be invisible as it may be obstructed by geometries from other records (they can be deleted or moved to make the new object visible).