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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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.
Knowing which toolbar buttons to use here is quite confusing. The toolbar buttons that look like magnifying glasses with paper behind them are for zooming in and out of the layout – as if you wanted to zoom‐up the size of the piece of paper. These are for adjusting the LAYOUT dimensions! These are for adjusting the DATA FRAME dimensions! the layout size The magnifying glasses without the paper behind them are for changing the data frame. From here, we have to determine where we are going to place our map elements. What are map elements? All maps should have the following things that deem them a map: SCALE: Using a scale bar is best in GIS when a particular scale is not an issue because the map can then be changed in size without losing the reference made to scale. You can place both a scale bar and a representative fraction or verbal scale if you desire ORIENTATION: Generally marked with a north arrow or a compass rose. However, you can really pick any cardinal direction you like and point an arrow that way – as long as you mark is as such. An arrow without any clarifier is usually considered to be pointing north. There are times that you may want to rotate the data in the data frame in such a way that the top is not pointing north (for example, if you were making a map of a stream that ran north‐to‐south, but your design required that the space allotted for the map run east‐to‐west. In this case, you could rotate the data frame to fit your map design as long as you marked which way was which way). TITLE: All maps need titles, and the title should be in large font – usually the largest font on the layout – and the title should be descriptive providing purpose and location/feature on the map. BORDER: Also referred to as a neatline, this bounding‐box surrounds the geographic extent of your map graphic and differentiates the map for the other map elements. Another bounding‐box that can be included (and is also sometimes referred to as a neatline) goes around all of the map components, creating a ‘frame’ around the entire layout. Experiment with both of these. LEGEND: These define what the colors, symbols, and patterns are representing on the map. Also called a Key. Making a good legend isn’t as easy as it sounds, because you have to choose what you think needs description and not include colors or symbols that may be intuitive – like water – do we need to list ‘water’ on our map legend? Would we distinguish from ‘lake / ocean / river / stream? Or would our labels on the map take care of this for us? Probably… The more data used in the map, the more cluttered the legend becomes. If you legend is crowded, this is a good indicator that your map may be over‐crowded too. MAP CREDITS: Really important component… The following should always be listed Data Sources – not where you got the data, but who published it. If you don’t know you probably shouldn’t be using the data. Also include vintage (year of data production) Name – of the cartographer. I use my initials (RJH). Date – of the map layout/publication – date of the data should be listed under data source.
Page 1: Intro to GIS Exercise #5 - Symbolog
Page 5 and 6: About symbolizing data to represent
Page 7 and 8: normalizing the data. For example,
Page 9 and 10: What is a geometric series? A geome
Page 11 and 12: Tips � You can change a break on

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?