Community
and Regional Planning Program
The University of Texas at Austin School
of Architecture
ArcView Tips Home Page
Cartography Tips
Cartography Tips:
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For examples of good map design, look at the annual ESRI Map Book
publications we have on the GIS shelves in Sutton Lab
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Remember to always use the Theme-Properties to rename your themes
so that they are understandable to a normal human being. E.g., "Streets"
instead of "cenline.shp".
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You should always include a title, legend, scale, north arrow, and
cartographer/date information.
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It is good practice to include data source information
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You can hide any legends that you do now want to appear in the legend by
choosing Theme-Hide Legend in the View window.
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A student last year found the Desaturate Legend script available on
the ArcScripts web
site (search for desaturate). It is especially useful for toning
down some of the colors in themes that are necessary background but which
might otherwise overwhelm the map. For example, the standard land use colors
in the ArcView legend file from the City of Austin are very bright (see
normal map). By using the Desaturate
Legend script, you can make these more pale, so that more important
information (e.g., walkable buffer zones) would draw the viewer's attention
(see desaturated map). To use this script,
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save it from the ESRI
ArcScripts web site
(or copy it from the Taniguchi GIS Data Server under the Utilities
folder (in either case, the final file name should be desaturate.ave)
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Start ArcView, and add the theme(s) which you want to desaturate. If you
have a legend set up for it that you like, make sure that you save this legend
file (open the legend editor and click on the Save button to save
the current layout as a new ArcView Legend file). If you want to desaturate
an existing legend, load the existing legend file (e.g., Landuse-95.avl)
by opening the legend editor and clicking on the Load button.
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In the Project menu, click on the Scripts icon (if necessary,
scroll down - it is below the Views, Tables, etc. icons)
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Click on the New button
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Choose Script - Load Text File and navigate to find the
desaturate.ave file. Click OK. This loads this script into your script
box.
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Choose Script - Compile (or click on the checkmark icon) -
the script is now ready for use.
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Click on your View to make it the active window and make sure
that the theme you want to desaturate is the active theme
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Go back to the Script window again and make it the active window,
and choose Script-Run (or click on the running person icon)
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Click Yes, when asked whether to desaturate with white
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Leave the desaturation amount set to 50% (you can experiment with this later)
and click OK
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If you do not like the results, re-load the original ArcView legend file
for the theme and try again with a different saturation percentage
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If you like the results, save them to a new ArcView legend file
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For information about using text labels and color/symbol palettes, see
Tim's
Tips for ArcView from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
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To create a good shaded relief map:
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With your DEM as the active theme, create a hillshade grid (choose Surface
- Compute Hillshade)
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Double-click on the DEM's legend to bring up the legend editor
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In the legend editor, click on the Advanced button and choose the
Hillshaded grid as the brightness theme. Experiment with the cell
brightness numbers to test the results.
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Also experiment with your number of classes in the legend, and with the shades.
Make sure your legend type is set to Graduated Color. If you set the first
and last colors, you can use the Color Ramp icon
(
)
to ramp the colors between the beginning and end colors. See the sample
hillshade map of the Austin region, and then
look at the legend editor settings used to create
this map.
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For more detailed information, see
New Color System
Enhances Relief Maps, ArcUser Magazine (January-March 2001 issue).
This article discusses the new ShadeMax color system that Nat recommended
in class. The easiest way to find the ShadeMax download on ESRI's
ArcScripts web site
is to do a search for shademax.
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For information and examples of using MapPublisher with ArcView files,
see Nat Brown's web site:
http://mather.ar.utexas.edu/students/cadlab/nat_gis_web/project/projectIndex.html
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05 November 2001
The School of Architecture at
UT Austin
Comments to: Barbara Parmenter