topic Attribute driven symbology - how to disable rotated text? in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Attribute driven symbology - how to disable rotated text?

David_Brooks — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:38:35 GMT

I'm designing a symbol showing the angle of view of photo locations. I would like to label each location with the viewpoint number, driven by an attribute. I don't want to use standard labelling because the larger yellow dot rotates behind the smaller dot, which is the anchor point of rotation. (rotation is also attribute driven).

Does anyone know a way of achieving this without the text also rotating? i would like it horizontal.

Re: Attribute driven symbology - how to disable rotated text?

AlfredBaldenweck — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:34:55 GMT

Ooooh this was annoying to figure out.

Make your basic symbol
Duplicate the parts sticking out from the middle and reverse their offset so that it's symmetrical (I also rotated the other triangle by 180 degrees here)
Save it to a style
Clear out all but two marker symbol layers
Make the one on top your text marker
Make the bottom one the symbol you just added to a style
It'll come in teeny so be prepared to scale it up. Make sure to only touch SIZE, not Point Size, or else your anchor point gets screwed up and you have mess around a bunch with absolute anchor points to get it right.

Mine needed to be about 46pts when the base symbol had a point size of 10 while making it. Make another layer with the base symbol to check for sure. It'll never be exact.
Allow Symbol Property connections
Set your text marker to the field you want
Set your rotation angle of the other symbol layer to match your rotation field
Format the point symbol of the viewer
Turn off the reverse symbols from step 2
Hit apply

It would be really cool if we could set internal rotation with symbol property connections separately from the overall symbol varying by attribute. If you make an Idea for it, I'll upvote it.

Re: Attribute driven symbology - how to disable rotated text?

David_Brooks — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 13:43:15 GMT

@AlfredBaldenweck you sir, are a scholar and a gent. some hard work went into this solution. I appreciate it!

A colleague of mine also came up with a different solution using labels which just about fits the bill, but yours is definitely the best solution to do it through symbology alone, without labelling.

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In the end I used a label with a callout symbolised as a yellow point symbol for the text container point.

Then on the label position tab, I set the rotation to the bearing field and added an additional 180 rotation to get these points and the text to display to the rear of the other symbols, with the text alignment type set to horizontal.

Its just about there but may need a little tweaking.