HOW TO: Make course line easier to see

Agree 100 %. Ground cover just clutter up the tiny screen to make the important roads and the route so much harder to discern.

I've always wondered what the hell is ground cover in the edge - it's all that ground details - big buildings, swamp, water, grass etc..Is there a way to remove the ground cover ? That's why the Wahoo maps looked better while riding - it only has the roads....which what you only need when riding.

I added opacity controls to my theme editor. Or rather, it's actually a visibility on/off toggle – at least my Edge doesn't seem to support more than that. This allows hiding elements in maps.

There's now the ability to upload your own theme file for editing in the editor.

Hi, I have tried your editor on my 1040, I copied the file produced by it, selected the theme...but no changes are visibile...

I also noticed for each file i copy to the themes folder, I always get two entries on the dropdown menu, "MY-THEME" and ".My-THEME"....

To be honest, I do know what I am chaging....but would like to try and see how I can improve visibility...

That second entry is a meta data file created by your computer. You can view and delete it via some file management tools and e.g. terminal. I don't think there's a way to prevent them from appearing. Garmins aren't smart enough to ignore them. It has nothing to do with the theme editor, so nothing I could do in that end. They cause no harm other than that extra entry in theme list, mind. 

As for the theme change not producing visible changes: this one's tough to debug without access to the device. Do you see a difference when switching between the themes that came with the device? Also, if you made just small changes, there's a chance features you changed don't appear in your particular map (or area). To test, you could create a version of the classic theme where everything's orange and switch to that. The result should be impossible to miss. 

I will try...thanks for the idea...

I had a similar problem with the mountain biking maps that the information on this thread helped me solve. Someone on my original thread recommended that I post a reference to that solution here:

Mtb trails drawn twice on map

To summarize:

Problem: The Edge 1040 trail maps show two copies of the trail lines - one from the basemap ,and another from the Trailforks layer (i.e. specialized, generally better database of off-road paths). The two sets of lines are slightly different, making it difficult to read the map.

Solution: By customizing the map theme XML as described on this thread, I was able to make map themes that either 1) removed the basemap trails entirely, or 2) made them blend into the background better.

New information: I don't think my solution fundamentally adds anything to this thread, other than 1) another practical example, and 2) possibly the use of the alpha channel in the color specifications to make things transparent. I don't recall reading about transparency here, but I'm not going to re-read all 6 pages of posts to check so...

In a nutshell, the color #ff333333 is a dark gray line, and #00333333 is a transparent line. Presumably using other values than "ff" and "00" will give partially-transparent colors, though I haven't tested. Of course, if you set full transparency with "00", the rest of the color spec doesn't matter.

I don't know how to link to a specific post in a thread, but if you want to browse the details, use the link above to hop over there and scroll down to the post on the first page that has a series of XML blocks + screenshots showing the customization results.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread; your help is going to make my mountain biking experience with the Edge better.

Thanks for sharing. In case you don't want to edit XML files by hand, my little editor supports hiding elements with transparency (see a few posts up). I tested this back then and found that at least my Edge (Explore 2) only supported fully opaque and fully transparent, nothing in between.

You can not break it. The inbuilt software has a default value for each element (color) and the MapTheme files have entries that override the defaults. If you make a mistake then your entry is ignored and you just get the default. You can just select another standard file, the inbuilt ones get recreated each power cycle.

It is good practice to also modify the title & description so you can remember what you have changed

The color format has 8 characters after the # with the first 2 being the transparency value, see the post two above yours by SomeGarminOwner

Ps it is best to change one thing at a time until you are happy with the result and know it works

In the 6 pages there is also reference to changing the cursor color but the size can not (currently) be altered

<style field="MPM_VEHICLE_BRDR_CLR">
            <color>
                <primary day="#ff000000" night="#ff000000"/>
                <secondary day="#ff000000" night="#ff000000"/>
            </color>
        </style>
        <style field="MPM_VEHICLE_CLR">
            <color>
                <primary day="#ff000000" night="#ff000000"/>
                <secondary day="#ff000000" night="#ff000000"/>
            </color>
        </style>
        <style field="MPM_VEHICLE_LEFT_CLR">
            <color>
                <primary day="#ff00a8f8" night="#ff00a8f8"/>
                <secondary day="#ff00a8f8" night="#ff00a8f8"/>
            </color>
        </style>
        <style field="MPM_VEHICLE_RGHT_CLR">
            <color>
                <primary day="#ff00a8f8" night="#ff00a8f8"/>
                <secondary day="#ff00a8f8" night="#ff00a8f8"/>
            </color>
        </style>
        <style field="MPM_VEHICLE_BACK_CLR">
            <color>
                <primary day="#ff00a8f8" night="#ff00a8f8"/>
                <secondary day="#ff00a8f8" night="#ff00a8f8"/>
            </color>
        </style>
        <style field="MPM_VHCL_HGLT_CLR">
            <color>
                <primary day="#ff000000" night="#ff000000"/>
                <secondary day="#ff000000" night="#ff000000"/>
            </color>
        </style>