google site maps - marker size

[pagetta]

I am not a very experienced developer in terms of adding things like google maps to your site, and have relied on basic online tutorials to get me a google map, with a marker, with a bubble that says 'directions from here and to here' in it.

However, our offices are centred on the map and when you click for the bubble it pushes the location down as the marker is so big - is there a way to overcome this - either change the size of the marker or offset the center point somehow? something simple would be fantastic although is suspect it won't be!

thanks v much!

[wige]

The API doesn't seem to offer a way to shrink the size of the bubble - even if you only have one line of text the bubble seems to want to display four lines of space. The best thing I could think to work around this would be to have the directions to/from as text links elsewhere on the page, possibly stylized and located below the map. We use the Yahoo maps API, which don't have the embedded directions option and that was the easiest solution for us.

[mccreath]

You can set the maps center position with something like:

map.setCenter(new GLatLng(53.36775, -1.4991), 17);

17 is the zoom level.

You can use Google Earth to find your lat/long, just set the Tools->Options so it shows lat/long in degrees. Find you spot and create a place holder on it. The place holder dialog provides a copyable lat/long.