Latest Contributions by GregoryElwood1

Hello Breken! Buffers seem like they would work. Can you clarify what you mean by "service provider"? Does that mean service like a utility (gas, electricity) or an online, hosted Service like and ESRI AGOL Service? Gregory ... View more

As a quick, additional note, I set the Map Units and Display Units in Data Frame Properties to Feet. I also use "Move To" (right-click when editing vertices) a lot. You can copy and paste X and Y values to different vertices and make accurate lines and polygons, which can often come in handy when you want to calculate area. ... View more

Wow! After looking at your attached photograph, all I can say is: "what a nightmare!" Out of chaos, however, often comes order. Maybe get a laser rangefinder and get some distance readings that you could use to estimate the size and movement of the ice blocks in your photos. Play around with creating ice block footprints. Bring these in to ArcScene and extrude them. Maybe play around (a lot!) with 3D editing to get your extruded shapes to look more realistic. Possibly integrate the 3D ice blocks with whatever DEM or other elevation/surface data you may have. Try draping some of the photos over the 3D geometry that you create. I don't know that I would use Photoshop for this, but that's just me. You might be able to get something really good from PS. Between geotagging the photos and laser rangefinding the ice blocks, perhaps you can get some imagery that can be applied to modeling the events, rather than just having photographs that provide a visual reference. Maybe. Perhaps. I've never done anything like this, so feel free to toss my suggestions. Stay warm and good luck! Gregory ... View more

Trish, thanks for the reply! I should have elaborated on what I'm experiencing. I do set the edit condition for "Edit Vertices", although I do it with a menu icon in a modified Editor Toolbar (Customize / Toolbars / Commands). Currently, my map is a mix of symbology, some just symbolized, some symbolized and then a Cartographic Representation created for that layer. The inability to edit individual vertices usually occurs when I attempt to do a touch-up edit of a street centerline while in Layout View. The condition occurs randomly, but once it happens, it seems to want to stick around. It can start when I attempt to edit a vertex on either a symbolized layer or a layer with Representation. The really frustrating part is when I have to stop working on my map altogether. Open a new, blank map and try to edit the centerline vertices in Data View. The inability to edit individual vertices occurs even after I load up just one Feature Class in a blank map! A restart of my computer usually clears the condition - for a while. Is anybody else experiencing something like this? Gregory ... View more

Greetings! I worked as an Intern on an Address Verification project for one of the incorporated cities in the greater Los Angeles area. I have a few thoughts to share. Our project started with the acquisition of multiple lists of known addresses. These lists came from voter rolls, sanitation records and a list purchased from a commercial marketing company. The lists were merged and used as data in ArcPad running on Compaq PDA's (this was a while ago). Myself and two other interns walked the city for three months one summer and verified whether or not an address was in our list. The ArcPad application was configured as a form that we could fill out in the field. We had the ability to add address numbers to the list while we were in the field. All of the address numbers collected in the field were post-processed until a master, GIS shapefile of verified address points existed as the end result. This list was then provided by the GIS team to other city departments (e.g. Fire, Police, Code Enforcement, Planning, etc.). During the post-processing, many different kinds of issues arose. Parcels are sometimes useful for knowing the situs address, but not always. Bootleg addresses were fairly common, as in un-permitted garage units or businesses sub-letting out the back of their building to another company. The Post Office will deliver whatever they have in their bag to a mailbox if the number matches, so bootleg addresses could spring up and be working for the occupants very quickly with no notice to the City whatsoever. Large, multi-story condo developments could be a nightmare if care was not taken to ensure that multiple, co-incident parcel polygons were not being handled correctly. If going with ArcGIS as your application, I highly recommend acquiring the book "Designing Geodatabases". It has helped me a lot over the years. Good luck! Gregory ... View more

Not to hijack this thread (too much!) but does anyone have any good suggestions on how to get a good, cased, dashed-line-for-dirt-road-symbol going? And just to make it a real challenge, how about a dashed-line cul-de-sac symbol? Gregory ... View more

Jim, do you know a trick for getting a .png file that has multiple transparencies in to an ArcMap document? (i.e. solid black text over a 50% transparent color oval on a 100% transparent background?) Thanks! Gregory ... View more

Wow! That's...uh...interesting. Square root of derived polygon area. That seems to me more appropriate for a Geoprocessing tool or something rather than a simple geometry editing tool. But what do I know? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Temc4-G0Fu4 Onward! Gregory ... View more

Jeff, Thanks for responding to my persistant questioning. I know I'm being a pain. I have a much better understanding of what arcpy.mapping is meant to do, now. To answer the direct question about what I would want a page size function to do, the answer is "Yes", all of it. I would want the aspect ration of everything to change if the page size and data frame were to be modified. But I also want to be able to turn that off if I determined I needed it to be. The layers in the TOC (and the scale) should be able to be "locked" even if the data frame aspect ratio and page size were changed. As an end user, flexibility and choice are good. Part of what has been driving my line of questioning in this thread is the notion that ArcObjects is, in a sense, on the way out. ESRI announcements that VBA will no longer be supported helped to foster this. I wish to embrace Python and ArcPy going forward, and I fully understand your statement about redundancy. But I also have high standards for ArcGIS in general, I want it to be able to do many things that it currently doesn't do. Especially in term of graphics functionality. Sometimes, I wish ESRI would just get licenses for Adobe Illustrator functions and make them available as an Extension. That would save a lot of us a whole lot of time. Oh well...can we at least have the ability to create a data frame from scratch in arcpy.mapping? Someday? Maybe...? Thanks again! Gregory ... View more