Clipping annotation to a polygon in coverage feature class

[MurrayBrady]

Hi guys, I have some UK Ordnance Survey OpenData background vector mapping (Strategi) that I need to use, only I don't need the huge amount of annotation in the data for the whole of the UK. I'd like to clip it to a region which works great for polylines, points, polygons features but not for text. I think this may be because the annotation in the dataset is supplied as a coverage feature class, not as a shp like the rest of the layers.

So yeah clip to polygon wont work, also converting to a shapefile or geodatabase class wont either as it merely converts the text on the map to a straight line!, clearly not what I want!

Do we know any workarounds for this, I think there may be a license level issue here, we only have an ArcView licence, v 9.1.

Thanks again guys, much appreciated.

Murray

[JohnSobetzer]

There is an import coverage annotation to geodatabase tool in the conversion toolbox.  It can do a nice job with text but any leader lines turn into squiggles.  It is a known bug that will probably never be fixed.

I can't recall if 9.1 Arcview could still edit coverage tables via the calculator outside an edit session, but if it can you could select the annotation you want, calculate a value for those records, and then use a definition query to limit display to them.  If 9.1 can't edit the table but you have Arcview 3x anywhere you could use it to add a field and calculate into it during an edit session.

[MurrayBrady]

Thanks!

It's not so much that I want to limit display, as you can appreciate there is a LOT of text in there, for the whole of the UK, that I need to split into different Scottish Regions and upload to a client's serve. So to keep the speed of redrawing up and the file size down we really need to scrub the extra annotation from the attribute table. I've never really worked with Coverages before.

I'm trying the 'to geodatabase' toolbox 'import coverage annotation' but it's coming up with an error of;

'Output isn't a workspace for annotations'

Any idea what that might mean?

Cheers everyone.

[JohnSobetzer]

I've never seen that error before.  Are you using the tool within ArcMap or ArcCatalog?  I faintly recall problems doing it with ArcCatalog.  It's worked fine for me in ArcMap except for the leader lines.  An advantage of the ArcMap approach is you can select the coverage annotation ahead of using the tool, and then it will only convert the selected annotation.

[MurrayBrady]

I've never seen that error before.  Are you using the tool within ArcMap or ArcCatalog?  I faintly recall problems doing it with ArcCatalog.  It's worked fine for me in ArcMap except for the leader lines.  An advantage of the ArcMap approach is you can select the coverage annotation ahead of using the tool, and then it will only convert the selected annotation.

I've managed to convert the annotation to a geodatabase format, but now whenever I clip the new annotation to the region polygon the text is always replaced by polygons.

Is this a common thing? Everything else clips fine but this text is a nightmare! This is in both catalog and arcmap.

[JohnSobetzer]

So the conversion worked, but the subsequent clipping of it produced the polygons?

What about using the region polygon to select annotext, and then exporting those to their own layer as a workaround?  Or using a select query of attributes, if that will work, to do the same?