Adding legends to printed maps

bszukalski — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:13:00 GMT

ArcGIS Explorer provides basic printing capabilities that enable you to do a "quick print" of your map, and allows you control (via the chosen printer) options like orientation and page size.

You can view the legend for a map item by choosing its Tools tab, then clicking Show Legend. Or by right-clicking the item in Contents and choosing Show Legend. Though the legend is displayed, it is not captured in the quick print of the map. But here's a way to include one on your print using Image Overlays.

First, capture the legend and copy it to a program like Paint or something similar. Here we've used Photoshop to add a blue border, and we've also offset the legend by 50 pixels or so from the left side.

When you're satisfied with how it looks, save it out as a PNG file, then add the PNG as an Image Overlay.

Once you've done so you can choose its position.

We've chosen the option to center the overlay along the left side of our map. Because we left a transparent margin in the PNG file, it will be offset from the edge.

Now all we have to do is print.

Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience

ArcGIS-Explorer-Team — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:17:00 GMT

One of the properties of a map is a Display Overlay, a handy thing to use when you want to stamp your map with a company logo or some other message like we've done below. You can learn more about this and other options under the Setting map properties Help topic.

But in this particular case we used the display overlay for something a little different. We were working on a map for a specific audience, and because of our presentation goals we wanted to hide as much of the Explorer user interface as possible. The goal was to eliminate everything except for the globe showing our data and a legend, and the navigator.

Normally the legend is displayed by right-clicking on a layer in Contents and choosing Legend. But we wanted the legend always visible, and eliminated these clicks completely by capturing it and creating a PNG file to use as the display overlay. We kept a small transparent boundary around our legend PNG so it would be placed out of the corner and slightly onto our map.

To add our legend PNG to the display, we chose File > Map Properties, clicked Display Overlay, and set the options as shown below.

This is how our map looked so far:

But we wanted to streamline our map even further. We did so by hiding the console (by clicking View and unchecking it) and also toggling Auto Hide Menu Bar (checking it on), as shown here:

We also removed the coordinate display along the bottom of our map by going to Tools > Options, and unchecking Positional Text under Map Display:

And here's our final map, with our legend always visible and our minimal user interface.

ArcGIS Explorer Blog : Legend

Adding legends to printed maps

Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience