Mapping Center

Not all of the new functionality for mapping and cartography was shown in the mapping section of the What's New in 9.3 PDF that's available on the new Resource Center. New with both the 3D and Spatial Analyst Extensions in ArcGIS 9.3 is the Contour with Barriers tool, which generates contours from a raster surface and allows you to limit the creation of the contours to either side of a barrier. This tool has several improvements over the the existing contour tool. Read More...

We got a good question on Ask a Cartographer this morning.  The gist of the question was how to go about symbolizing street centerlines so they could be drawn using line symbol widths that reflected, at scale, the actual width of the road (as shown in the image to the left). This is a good cartographic solution because varying the line width adds hierarchy to the roads -otherwise it would be hard for you map reader to know which are wider or more heavily used. Read More...

I've spent the last few months immersing myself in ArcGIS 9.3, particularly ArcGIS Server and ArcGlobe in order to create some map and globe services and see how they work in ArcGIS clients, Google Earth, and Virtual Earth. These services need to look good and draw fast. One factor that can dramatically influence drawing performance is whether projection-on-the-fly is being used.  Projection-on-the-fly will slow your map down, anywhere from 30% to 1000% slower (depending on the coordinate systems involved). Read More...

Whether you’re labeling soils, buildings, geologic units, lakes, or parks; you’ll eventually be faced with the problem of the text for the label being larger than the polygon you’re labeling. In most cases we recommend offsetting the labels from the small polygons and using leader lines to positively associate the label with its feature. The general idea is to split up the labeling of a layer into at least two label classes, one for the normal case, and one for the small features. Read More...

ArcGIS 9.3 has hit the streets, meaning some of you should have it in hand this week, and most of you will have it in the coming weeks. After you get it installed definitely read the What's new in ArcGIS 9.3 PDF [13Mb] (it also installed with ArcGIS 9.3 at C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Documentation\Whats_New_In_ArcGIS_93.PDF). Use the text search (CTRL-F) to find content, like "Maplex" or "Representations", or whatever term best describes the enhancement you've been hoping for. Read More...

Not long ago we found a workflow that demonstrated how convenient it would be to be able to copy a representation class. The situation arose as we were creating a map service for a map that had been designed for print. The problem was that many of the symbols were too small and detailed to be seen clearly on screen. Our symbols were already cartographic representations, so we didn't want to edit them (to make them larger) because we still needed them to produce our print map. We also didn't want to have to create and manage an extra copy of our data just to manage one additional attribute (the one added for representations). Read More...