Adding Graphics to Views or Layouts

ArcView's Text tool , Label Tool  and Draw tool  let you add text, labels and drawn graphics to a View or a Layout.  The previous page introduced autolabeling.  The figure here illustrates some styles of text or label elements you can add to a map: normal or bold, text in raised box, text curved (splined) to a series of points, text with pointer line, cartoon pointer....  Use the Pointer tool  to select any graphic element for moving, resizing or deleting.

As noted previously, the Label tool  labels individual features with values extracted from any specified field in the Theme Attribute Table.  Specify the Label Field in Theme-Properties, select the Label tool and label style, and then click on any feature you want to label.  Move and resize the label, edit its text or rotate it, as desired.

To draw other graphic features on a View or Layout, use the Draw tools.  When drawing lines with more than two vertices, or drawing polygons, place the last vertex with a double-click.

To set the font, color or line style of your graphics before you draw them, use Window--Show Symbol Window, which accesses the Fill Palette, Pen Palette, Marker Palette, Font Palettet, Color Palette and Palette Manager--it's the same window you get when editing View legend symbol styles.  The choices made here become the default styles in Graphics--Text and Default Labels.

Charts

ArcView supports generation of area, bar, column, line, pie or scatter charts in Chart windows.  Each Chart is linked to a Table.  If you select certain records in the Table (or select them via the View), values for the selected records are charted; if no records are selected, the Chart displays (or attempts to display) values for all records.  If you change an element in the View or Table, the change is automatically reflected in the chart.

To open a Chart window, select the "Chart" icon from the Project window and click "New" or, if the Table window you will base the Chart on is active, click the Chart button .  This will activate the Chart--Properties dialog window.

There are three principal dialog windows used in creating charts.  The Chart--Properties window lets you specify one or more data fields in a Table to be charted, and the field to use for labeling your chart elements.  Each style of chart (area, bar, etc.) has a Chart Gallery to choose from; for example, you could create a bar chart of population age-distributions by state, showing percents of population as side-by-side bars (as in the graphic below), stacked bars, etc.  To edit your chart, click the Chart Element Properties tool  which lets you edit the title, legend, axes, etc.  To change the color of any chart element, use the Chart Color tool  , select a color and click on an element to make it that color.

The Chart menu lets you switch between charting multiple fields as "Series from Fields" or as "Series from Records".  When charting multiple fields, "Series from Fields groups data by record; "Series from Records" groups data by field.  You'll figure it out when you play with it.

You will quickly find the limits of ArcView's charting capabilities: If you try to chart too many fields or records, you will quickly overload the Legend if not the entire Chart.  In the example, below, I calculated a "percent population change" firld for States.shp, then selected the six New England states, labeled them in the View, promoted the selected records to the top of the Attribute Table, and created the Chart to display the percent population changes.  This single-variable Chart uses "Series by Field" and uses the state abbreviation field for labels; the Chart legend has been hidden (Chart--Hide Legend).  Charted as "Series by Record", each bar would be a different color, and the legend would be needed to match colors to states.  I used the Chart Element Properties tool to specify the title and X-axis gridline interval.

You will sometimes find that your chart contains large outlier values that dwarf the other markers in the Chart.  In such cases, you could use a logarithmic scale (available with line or XY-scatter charts) rather than a linear scale, or you can simply delete the outlier feature markers, and the Chart will be automatically rescaled to show the variation in the remaining data more clearly.  To delete an individual features' markers from any Chart, use the Erase tool .  To delete a cluster of data markers from an XY-scatter Chart, use the Erase by Polygon tool .  To undo a marker erase use the Undo Erase tool .

Keep in mind that if ArcView's charting capabilities don't satisfy your needs, you can always create charts in Microsoft Excel (which can read dBase-format directly) or some other data analysis package.

Quick and Dirty Hardcopy--Screen Grabs with PrintScrn

To save a copy of your current screen, use the PrintScrn key to grab the contents of the entire screen to the computer's clipboard; then start a Paint session (Start--Programs--Accessories--Paint)and paste (Ctrl-V) the clipboard into the Paint program.  Crop, edit and save to (.BMP format only) as desired.  Use XView on Copland to convert the .BMP to .GIF or .JPEG formats.  Use Alt-PrintScrn to grab just the active window on your desktop (you'll get the whole ArcView session window, not just the active View, Table or whatever in it).  You can crop the image to just the View window, including the View legend if you like.  (PrintScrn is how I grab graphic examples for these web pages.)

File--Export

ArcView also lets you grab an image of the active View or Layout with the File--Export command.  The exported view can be in .BMP, .JPEG, .EPS or any of several other formats.  It will include the View's map only, not the View legend.  An image generated from a  screen grab is the same size as the source image on the screen.  You can't export Charts in this manner.

When a Table is active, File--Export copies the table to an external database file.

File--Print

To get a direct printout of the contents of a View, Chart or Layout window, activate the window and use File--Print.  If you print a View, you will get the only the map in the View, sized to fill the page in portrait or landscape mode as you choose.  If you have selected any features that are highlighted (yellow) in the View, these will be printed with the highlighting.  The output will not include the View legend.

When the active window is a Table, File--Print will print the entire table, including highlighting of any selected records.

Layouts

Since this isn't a cartography course, we're not going to spend much time worrying about cartographic niceties.  However, it's worthwhile knowing how to create a decent-looking map when the need for one arises.

To create anything fancier than a simple screen dump or View printout, create a Layout.  A Layout Window can include lots of elements from your Project: maps and legends from multiple Views, Tables and Charts, miscellaneous graphics, as well as conventional elements such as text titles and annotations, scale bar and compass rose or north arrow.  By default, the Views, Tables and Charts that you include in a Layout window are live linked so that any selections or changes you make in the source window will also appear in the Layout's version of it.  You can break the live link by simplyfying an element (so you could revise a View and include two versions of it in your Layout, for example), but once you simplify an element, you can't re-establish its live link.

To start a new  Layout window, activate the Project window, select the Layouts icon and click "New."  If you wish, you can choose a clunky  template via View--Layout or from the Layout--Use Template menu, although the default Arial font, undersized map, and oversized scale, compass rose, title and legend will make it obvious to everyone that you're an ArcView novice.  You see a lot of maps like the one shown here made from the standard ArcView templates, probably because View--Layout makes you use a template and people can't figure out where the Layout Pulldown Tool menu is.  The example here shows the defaults: no projection, legend defaults to the shapefile name, default legend classification and color ramp.  After you get some experience with Layouts and develop your own layout style, you can save your own Layout templates if you wish.

So start with a blank Layout.  Use Layout--Page Setup to set the page size, margins and orientation (portrait or landscape) of your layout.  Use Layout--Properties to adjust the density of the Layout's grid dots, which will guide your placement of elements in the Layout.  Note that Layout windows have snapping enabled, which means that your elements will automatically align with the Layout grid points.  You can disable this snapping if you wish.

Now you are ready to add elements to your Layout.  With the Layout window active, use the Layout pull-down menu to add successive elements as shown here.  Click the desired Add button, then drag a frame for the new element on your view to position it.  By default, you only control the scale of the element in the Layout, not the aspect ratio (you wouldn't want your map looking squashed).  Then in the Properties menu select the particular View, Table, Chart or whatever that you want included in that frame, and its display properties.

To resize or move elements, select them with the Pointer tool  and drag the corner handle to resize or drag the center to move.

To draw a neatline (box around the edge of a View or the whole the Layout), use the Rectangle tool, found in the Drawing tools pulldown menu  ; just drag the rectangle with the mouse.  You can add other graphic elements with the Drawing tools tool.  To add text, use the Text tool  .

To make fine adjustments to the position of a Layout elements, select the element and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to shift it in 1/72 inch increments.  Alternately, you can specify page coordinates for you elements via the Graphics--Size and Position menu.  To align components with each other, select them with the Pointer tool (holding the Shift key down to select multiple elements), then use Graphics--Align.

To print a Layout, use File--Print.  To export it to a graphic file, use File--Export.

You can save your own template from a Layout by emptying the View, Legend, Table and Chart elements--just specify "Empty" in the respective Frame Properties menus.   Once you have a generic Layout, use Layout--Store As Template, name the template and select an icon for it.

Here's a Layout created with two Views (autolabeled with some label editing) set to the same scale so that only one scale bar is needed.  The View legends are included as separate elements.  The Themes in the legends are appropriately classified, labeled and colored via the Legend Editor, and titled via Theme--Properties.  The map elements are as large as feasible, and the other Layout elements are fitted around them.  The various text elements are added with the text tool and resized appropriately.  The little graphic element at the bottom right is a .GIF image of Townsend Hall.  I thought about including a section of a Table and a Chart, but didn't want the Layout to get too cluttered.