Mapping Center

Depending on the type of highway you are labeling (interstate highway, U.S. route highway, or state route highway), the standard highway shield symbol may or may not be wide enough for all the characters in your labels.

Often, you do not get the desired outcome by simply using one shield for all highway number labels because one size rarely fits all! The numbers look “squished” or they overrun the shield symbol when there are more than two characters (depending on how large you make the shield and the characters).

Here are some tricks you can use to create highway shields for labels of varying widths, especially when there are more than two characters in some of the highway names. Read More...

Sometimes you will find that some annotation you had thought you produced is missing. You can add this missing annotation into your existing annotation feature class without having to recreate all the annotation. The approach you take will depend on whether you are creating standard annotation or feature-linked annotation.

Standard annotation elements are pieces of geographically placed text that are not formally associated with features in the geodatabase. For example, you might have a piece of standard annotation that represents a mountain range—the annotation simply marks the general area on the map. Read More...

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. Read More...

Just using Maplex to label your map will result in more labels and more of those labels correctly located. We've been saying that for a while now. The simpler your map is (fewer features and fewer clusters of features) the more likely it is that Maplex will be able to place all the labels correctly. Another dimension of getting correctly placed labels is knowledge of what is possible with respect to how Maplex works and how to best leverage its features. However, it does not matter whether your map is complex or you don't know as much as you would like to about Maplex--producing and editing annotation is the answer if you want your map to look its best. Read More...

We've received the title question several times in the past few months.  While a specific answer is already on Ask a Cartographer, I thought it would be good to address some of the circumstances that cause problems or require exceptions to our response: Read More...

Yesterday I got an email from a long time colleague showing me an online map and asking, “When will it be possible to do this map with ArcGIS”? The map is the interactive map of Washington DC at http://dc.everyblock.com. In particular my friend was looking at the crime map wondering how the proportional symbols showing crimes became disaggregated as he zoomed in, eventually showing individual crime sites. 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...

We got one of those perennial 'tough nut' questions on Ask a Cartographer today. The question had to do with annotation versus Maplex and what are often called overflow labels, which I have also heard called "key lists". While we are able to recommend tips and tools for specific circumstances or implementations, the person asking was more interested in what is the best strategy and why. So here's their question:

"We produce a 1"=1000' City map book from our GIS, similar to the Thomas Bros. street guides. Read More...

If you're making a map that is either a large format print map or a map that will be served via ArcGIS Server, squeezing every bit of wasted time out of drawing performance is critical. Don't get tired of sitting there drinking extra cups of coffee watching the word "Drawing", all your layer names, and that little blue globe. If you're finding it stressful to explain when updates will be coming, or the timing for caching the map you are serving, or your map services generate complaints about poor performance, then try the two tips in this entry. Read More...

So, you have just spent a few minutes deep in concentration setting up your labeling rules and applied them.  ArcMap's little globe is spinning, spinning... spinning... and nothing.  Several of your labels didn't draw. Panic and go to MappingCenter. Right?

Not exactly. 

There are a few things we always do when diagnosing the "where's my label" scenarios, no matter what's being labeled or what labeling engine is being used.  Read More...

Complex maps such as topographic maps present several significant challenges for setting up labeling rules and creating annotation.  The first challenge is that these maps typically have many layers and types of features, requiring map authors to create and manage numerous label classes. Second, these layers may have a high density of features, which means that automated labeling for these maps requires loading all the data into the labeling engine and making your computer to work fairly hard. Third, some labels on the map are very important and should be placed optimally (e.g., labels for cities or very important landmarks); some labels can be placed with some flexibility (e.g., placing river or stream names along lines; there are many candidate positions along a given line); and some labels are just less important (e.g., labels for contours, which must yield to the other information on the map) Read More...