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 ...

The map excerpt shown at right (click on it to see the details) shows an example of hollow cased roads.  The map is from a mosaic of USGS DRG image files.  The map specification requires that the cased road symbol contains a transparent gap.  The examples shown below were created with ArcMap 9.2 and used cartographic ...

The illustration at left shows a map of the Paris Metro system (RATP).  The routes are depicted in a schematic view and this kind of map is challenging to create because multiple routes may share the same path, for example multiple bus routes along a single road. When this happens, the coincident routes are offset in a fashion that makes ...

Symbolizing road overpasses or underpasses typically requires that you perform two data preparation steps.  First, identify which roads overpass other roads.  This may be very simple intersections between two roads, or it may include many other roads when dealing with complex highway interchanges.  Second, represent the interchanges ...

This is the first of three parts that cover how to symbolize roads with cased line symbols.  This first part will cover how to symbolize road centerline data so that the symbols look good, the second part will cover data modeling and symbolizing underpass/overpass relationships, and the third part will deal with symbolizing cul-de-sacs versus ...

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 since then in order to write this. The ...

A number of maps, particularly those geared towards outdoor tourism, rely on a convention that uses standard icons to list the services or amenities that are available at some place on the map. Using cartographic representations simplifies what used to be a rather unwieldy task from the perspectives of data modeling, data management, and ...

Dash-dot line symbols for polygon outlines should be displayed in a way that consistently shows the pattern of dashes and dots and clearly shows the shape of the polygon. In ArcGIS, a multi-layer line symbol is required. One layer is a cartographic line symbol with a dash pattern.  The second is a marker line symbol that shows ...

Notice in the first graphic below that the labels for ''CAJON ST'' and ''CLIFTON CT'' are placed over of major streets in a way that makes them difficult to read. This graphic is derived from my recent blog entry on the Maplex Street Placement option, and I was using the Street Placement option, but that left me with this problem. Well, this ...

You may already have the Maplex for ArcGIS Extension. It's free with an ArcInfo license of ArcGIS. Many ArcInfo users don't know this and that fact has unfortunately kept many people from taking advantage of the superior text placement capabilities in the Maplex Label Engine. One of those capabilities is the Street Placement option, it is ...