Hello, I am a county GIS technician that is making a series of large and small scale reference map for my county sheriffs department. As you know making a reference map from scratch that is legible is difficult. Are there any out of the box label groups and symbology groups online that can help me produce a boiler plate map fairly quickly with our internal data? I find this symbology provided with Archie Pro to okay but I not quite up to the standard I am looking for. I am trying not to spend the rest of my life adjusting drawing order and street and roads symbologies and making fine-tune adjustments to labels. I am in the United States, and I have very common things that need to be mapped like state, land, state forest, interstates, state, highways, major roads, minor roads, campgrounds, small towns, large towns, etc. Surely there’s a cartographer out there smarter than I that has their symbology and labels dialed in and has shared it. ... View more

We create maps for publication yearly.  We are finishing up this year and getting ready to make updates on maps for the next publication cycle. How do we archive our current maps/layouts/projects so that they are saved as is?  How do we go forward with updating the project WITHOUT making changes to the previous edition (archived copy)? It seems like we need to create a new project with a different name (e.g., 2024 version) and import the previous map(s) and layout (2023 version), however, I can't see how to import a Pro map or layout.  If I create a project package (old version) and open it in a new project, can I update it?  Will any updates be saved in the new project? ... View more

Hello all! I work for small county / city government. I'm the GIS administrator and I'm used to make professional maps and now I've been asked to make theme park styled map for special events and more specifically a Christmas parade next week. I know this isn't really a GIS type question since nothing on the map itself will be referenced to anything and will be a complete cartographic mess, but the city is wanting a fun map for children that represents the parade route and local amenities. I assumed some other GIS Professionals had been put in the same spot for local government. I've looked into using ArcGIS, but it doesn't seem practical for this type application. I've looked into SimCity products and even online city building games, so my question is, ha anyone had experience using any type of software that can do this? Thanks! ... View more