The vertical change in the elevation of the land surface, when determined over a given horizontal distance-along a road or stream, for instance-is known as its slope (Figure 1). There are three primary ways to quantitatively express the slope between two points. In each, the lower the slope value, the flatter the terrain, and the higher the slope ...

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 ...

This final part of the series will cover using cartographic representations for dashed lines, like the red and white cased lines in the image at the left, and for creating cul-de-sac or squared off ends to streets.  Both of these effects will build on the examples in the previous two portions of this series with one exception.  Because ...

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 ...

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 ...

Unfortunately there currently is no automated way in ArcGIS to evaluate contour lines and select those that are depression contour lines. There are some tools in the Spatial Analyst extension such as FLOW DIRECTION, SINK and FILL which may look useful for this purpose, but in fact are designed to find small irregularities in digital elevation ...