Hi all,
I'm having trouble with highway shield symbols in Pro. First off, let me state: I do NOT want to use the labels / annotations. It's much easier to just add a few text inserts in my layout. If I label highways, there are always TONS of extra labels, so I have to turn it into annotation, and then delete a bunch of them and move them around - and then they're usually too small anyway. It's much easier to just insert straight text in my layout and then I can make them in a size that my intended audience can actually read and is appropriate for the use of the map.
This works fine for interstate highways, because there's a ready made interstate shield I can use as a point callout. If I want to do this for any other type of highway, there are no appropriate shields. The only other shields available in point callouts are solid colored - without the option for a border.
So, a sort of standard map symbol for a state highway looks like this:
But in Pro, I can only have a solid-colored one, with no border, which doesn't work great. A white shield without the black border can easily disappear, depending on the background. I could make a black one with white text, but that's not really standard and can be confusing to the viewer. And, well, I just don't like it quite frankly.
I figured out that I can format a point symbol callout so I can have two layers of the callout. So I created a white shield with a slightly larger black shield underneath it to try to have the illusion of a border, but it looks clunky:
I can't make the black shield proportionally any smaller and when zoomed out to a realistic scale as it would appear on a map it looks messier; the black "border" is much too large and the two layers don't appear to fit one another properly.
I did attempt to find the appropriate symbol via labeling my highways layer but I couldn't find a better way to do it there either.
I found this post, https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-pro-questions/highway-symbols-from-ddv-issue-in-pro/m-p/355510 which appears to offer a solution to obtaining the appropriate symbols in a special file and having them saved some special place and importing them some special way - but really??? Do I have to go through all of that just to have a standard highway shield? I am spoiled from Map I guess but I really was hoping there's a much easier way to do this.
Thanks for your input!!
