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. There is always one active data frame. The active data frame tells ArcMap to use this data frame as the ...

I don’t hear this so much from cartographers and GIS professionals as I do from nearly everybody else who has to read our maps, “I didn’t even read the text on the map’. Matt Baker’s recent post addresses one of the most common causes, overly wide paragraphs, and I’ll cover another here, which is the size of text. A paragraph of text on a map ...

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 ...

We mentioned a few tips about legend design in our session called ''The One Minute Cartographer'' at the 2008 ESRI User Conference. (The PowerPoint presentation is available for download on the Other Resources page.) We decided to share those tips and some general guidance on legends here since some of you have been asking about legends lately on ...

We recently received a question about legends on Ask a Cartographer, so I thought we should post a blog describing some of the cartographic guidelines for legends that may help you make decisions about their design.  Here are some tips -- first related to page titles and legend titles, then some that are more general, and finally related ...

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 ...

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 ...

Here's a question that has, in various forms, been posed on Ask a Cartographer:  ''I have a map that has a hillshade and a DEM drawn with transparency on top of it. I cannot figure out how to make a legend that properly shows the final colors on my map; how is this done?'' First, there is no automated solution to this like there is for ...