Buffer vignettes symbolize the interface between two areas. They are often used to show the land-water interface by gradually fading blue at the coast into white or vice versa. You can also use them to fade the map out into a white background. These types of vignettes are created using buffers that are symbolized in a special way. Note -- as ...

Most of us use digital elevation models (DEMs) which are raster data sets that represent a continuous elevation surface in which each cell represents the elevation at its location. DEM data are typically available in tiles that are sized to balance ease of data sharing with coverage so that those who need several tiles to cover their area of ...

One of the most frequently recurring topics on Mapping Center is what to do with stacks or clusters of point features on maps. In August 2007, I wrote a blog posting on how to use Maplex to display coincident points, and this worked for some scenarios, but not all. New with 9.3 is a tool called Disperse Markers; it's in the Cartography toolbox, ...

Not all of the new functionality for mapping and cartography was shown in the mapping section of the What's New in 9.3 PDF that's available on the new Resource Center. New with both the 3D and Spatial Analyst Extensions in ArcGIS 9.3 is the Contour with Barriers tool, which generates contours from a raster surface and allows you to limit the ...

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 ...

I've spent the last few months immersing myself in ArcGIS 9.3, particularly ArcGIS Server and ArcGlobe in order to create some map and globe services and see how they work in ArcGIS clients, Google Earth, and Virtual Earth. These services need to look good and draw fast. One factor that can dramatically influence drawing performance is ...

Last month I was lucky enough to be invited to the USGS's Digital Mapping Techniques (DMT) conference. Unless you do geologic mapping this conference is likely not on your radar, but suffice to say it worth the effort to get to Moscow, Idaho on many counts.  One is that I met Andrew Wunderlich, who gave a great and detailed presentation on ...

I have recently ''invented'' a method for simplifying polygon map layers, which seems to give reasonable results. Probably many others have invented it before me, but I would like to present it in order to receive comments and advice on setting the appropriate parameters. My task was to produce a national soil map suitable at 1:1,000,000 scale on ...

Making maps with data that were never intended for mapping has it's challenges. One of them is trying to use the names from GNIS (Geographic Names Information System) (U.S. Board on Geographic Names).  Even when someone has gone to the effort of assigning these names to GIS features, the way the names are formatted can create problems.  ...

Have you ever wondered where a feature class came from as you've browsed over one of your geodatabases in ArcCatalog? I think most of us have, and probably more often than we'd like to admit. In the example shown here to the left, I made these datasets a few weeks ago, and I have no idea what ''GN'' means, and if or how I selected, simplified, or ...