Mapping Center

Recently, a group of us were annotating an online map that covers the contiguous United States at multiple scales. After a few weeks and many hours of annotation work, we came up with a list of tips that may be useful to you as well in your annotation editing.

1. If you know that you want all of your annotation placed but see that there are many unplaced labels, you can use the field calculator in the attribute table to place any unplaced annotation. In your attribute table in the Status column you will see that there are two values: Unplaced or Placed. If you want a quick way to get all of the annotation placed, first select all of the Unplaced values, then right click on the Status column and open the Field Calculator.
   
   
2. Often times, the default river text placement is too curved along its associated line feature. In one of Mapping Center's recent blog posts (Tips for working with curved annotation), we wrote about editing the baseline sketch to make the process of editing this text placement a little faster. In short, we recommend that you first convert curved text to single part, then set the curvature to straight and then set the curvature to curved. In doing so, you will minimize the number of vertices for the baseline which will make editing a much easier process.
   
   If you want to add another vertex, you can right click on the green dashed line and select Insert Vertex.
   

   

   
   
3. We found that an easier way to edit annotation (as in number 2 above) is to create keyboard shortcuts so you don’t have to constantly right click the mouse. For example, you can set shortcut keys for often used commands, such as Convert to Single Part, Straight, Curved, and Edit Baseline Sketch.
   
   To customize keyboard shortcuts, go to Tools > Customize and click Keyboard at the bottom of the dialog box. This is where you can assign shortcut keys to any command. To create a shortcut key, search for the desired command and assign the shortcut key you want to use for it. Note that your shortcut keys can be tailored to specific maps and saved in their .mxd files. Set this in the Customize Keyboard screen at the bottom right.
   
   
4. While editing text along a line feature, ArcMap automatically defaults to Follow Feature Mode. You can either right click to toggle this off when you don’t want to use it or use the F key as a shortcut. The F key toggles this option on and off (this is already set up in the annotation editing environment and does not require you to create its shortcut key). It might take a little while to get used to, but it is useful if you are editing a lot of line annotation.
   
   
5. It is useful to have the annotation attributes window visible while you are editing. You can open this window by clicking the Attributes button on the Editor toolbar (or by right clicking on a highlighted piece of annotation and selecting Attributes). Click the Attributes tab of this dialog box to see all of the properties for a selected piece of annotation. Here you can adjust lots of the annotation properties, including font properties, character spacing for text placed along longer features, character width, leading, etc.
   

   
   

6. We noticed that when you unstack a stacked label, the space between the two words is sometimes missing. Even if you add a space to the text in the Annotation tab, the added space does not show up on your map. The way to fix this is to increase the value in the 'WordSpacing' property (use a value of 100) on the Attribute tab.
   

   
   

   
   

   
   

   
   
7. The Editor toolbar and the Annotation toolbar are connected. If you want to add text to a particular annotation class, you have to make sure in the Editor toolbar that you are creating a new feature and that the Target is set to the proper annotation class.