Mapping Center : Page Layout

The State of Data Frames in Layout View

Cartographer — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

From time to time I hear from users or see postings indicating that they find the various states data frames can have a bit confusing.

Data frames on the layout can be active, selected, focused or some combination (or none) of the above....(read more)

Adding columns to text boxes

blackpoll — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As a judge for the Map Gallery at the Annual ESRI International User Conference, and the Cartographer for the ESRI Map Book, I am fortunate enough to see what many of you are doing with ArcGIS to create printed maps.

This year, one issue I frequently noted was very wide columns of text. Below is an example, and the reason it doesn't work is that it is hard to make your eye track along the long lines of text and then reliably find the next line. As presented, the text below almost guarantees that nobody will bother reading...(read more)

Cartographic Design: Inset Maps

abuckley — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:34:00 GMT

Recently we were asked if there are any cartographic standards for inset maps. Here are a few guidelines:

Purpose

First, consider why the inset map is needed. Inset maps are sometimes used to show related themes of data at smaller scales, for example: ...(read more)

Set legend colors to match feature layer transparency

pkasianchuk — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:40:00 GMT

This question comes in fairly regularly at Ask A Cartographer, so I felt it was time to add a brief blog to use for future queries. This issue is a common one, and is the topic of a Knowledge Base article that describes the basic steps needed to solve the problem. The value added here is a bit more discussion as to why this is a necessary workflow....(read more)

Creating Street Name Indexes

cfrye — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 22:51:00 GMT

We received a suggestion to write a blog entry on this topic from Anna Schwabedal, who is a technical sales representative for ESRI Germany. Anna gave us a rough idea of how this works and I was able to use that when this topic came up through Ask a Cartographer recently, and I've worked on it a bit more since in order to write this....(read more)