Intro to GIS Exercise #5 – Symbology and Map Layout / Design IUP ...

hierarchy, meaning use a washed‐out color to make the label almost disappear from initial view
and that is most discernable upon closer inspection. You may also want to add more than 1 space
between characters (wide‐spaced) in the label. This spacing, in combination with the dull coloring,
produces a label that can cover a large area (such as a state) that is at the bottom of the visual
hierarchy (or put another way, that seams to be farther away from the viewer than other features
in your design). Mountain ranges can be labeled with both splined text and wide‐spaced lettering.
Another labeling technique that is almost always necessary to use is rotating the text label. Rotated text
should be read from the bottom up, meaning the beginning of the word should begin towards the bottom
of the layout and extend toward the top of the design.
Avoid crossing feature lines with text, meaning don’t place a label on a vector feature. If it is necessary to
do so, use the ‘halo’ effect in the label properties. The halo effect can also be used with point
symbolization.
Scale: The ratio scale value shows in the top tool bars of the data view. A good place to start when trying
to determine the best scale to display your data in (unless there has been a scale determined in the scope
of work phase) is to right‐click on the data feature you are interested in and scroll down to ‘zoom to layer’.
Let’s zoom to the TLCW_dissolve feature. The scale to which the data frame zooms to depends on the
size of your data frame in ArcMap… and the size of the data frame depends on several things, like: the size
of your hardware display (i.e., monitor) / do you have lots of tool windows open either to the top (on the
toolbar) or on the sides (i.e., ArcToolbox) /do you have the ArcMap program maximized to display in all of
the area available on your monitor (maximize by clicking the square between the line (minimize) and the
red ‘X’ (close) at the top right of the window (as is done on all Microsoft Windows applications).
The zoom to layer command will fit the entire feature in the available space allotted to the data frame.
Most often this is some odd number. The scale will also change when you switch from the data view to
the layout view – this is due to the different dimensions of the data frame.
Layout view: Once you have chosen the data sets that you want to display in your map and you have them
added to the data view, click the button at the bottom left of the data frame in the data view that switches
to the layout view.
This one!
Should look something like this…
Now, before we go on, let’s go to page set up and pick
our paper size. Goto File – Print and Page Setup. In this
window choose ‘Tabloid’ in the Paper‐Size pulldown
menu. Hit OK.
Drag the blue squares of the data frame to the
appropriate size that you want for the new 17’ by 11’
paper.