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 : User Interface

Display overlay, legends, and streamlining the user experience