Ability to index a map book with 2 different scales.

595
5
08-16-2011 07:12 AM
Status: Open
AnitaHaggerty
New Contributor II
In 9.3.1 we were able to use DSMapbook to produce mapbooks with more than one size page. In ARC10 with the new data driven pages you do not have the ability to produce an index for a mapbook using multiple scales. A lot of counties produce map books of their whole county, and some of the areas are not nearly as congested as the areas in the cities. That is where the different scales come into play. Currently I am using 3 different scales to produce a mapbook of my county and have to take my data out of ARC10 and put it on a computer with 9.3.1 just to produce an index. If I didn't have this capability, them I would have to reduce all of my pages down to the smallest page size which would in turn increase the number of pages in my map book by roughly 200 percent. I feel that this could be an easy fix by making the gird indexing feature in data driven pages capable of producing an index while recognizing more than one page size. I know that everything is moving towards interactive maps and away from paper maps, but consideration still needs to be taken for entities that aren't quite there yet.
Thanks
5 Comments
BruceLang
This is good to know as I'm not yet familiar with ARC10.  Another case where multiple print scales are necessary is emergency response books.  Areas vary between large (e.g. buildings ) and small (e.g. towns) scales.
ChrisMathers
You can make a grid with multiple sizes. Just make one grid at the smallest needed size and then merge tiles that should be pages with a different scale. How are you indexing by the way? Do  you mean the page numbering or a road index?
AnitaHaggerty
I am trying to make a road index. We have tried almost everything and can come up with nothing. The only way that we have found to do it takes longer to create an index than it does to create and place all annotation in the map book itself. 
ChrisFox
Data Driven Pages has the ability to set unique scale for each page with the use of Data Driven Scale. All you need is a numeric field in your index layer that contains the scale you wish to use for that page. For example if the first row in your index layer has a value of 1,000 the page will center the extent of the page on the center of the extent of the first row's feature and set the scale to 1:1,000. If the second row is 100,000 it wil center the extent again for that feature and set the scale to 1:100,000.

To enable Data Driven Scale from the Setup Data Driven Pages dialog under the Extent tab select the radio button next to Data Driven Scale and select the appropriate field that will contain the extent values.
BradNesom1
The scale does work but then you have the problem of the reference scale.
So if I set my reference scale and go to a page with a long line fieature on it. the text and symbol are small. but then a page with a short line feature and the text and symbol are huge.
BTW I am using a line fieature class as my index layer.  
I began trying to set the spatial reference as the reference scale but quickly realized this was not controlling reference scale but spatial coordinate system for each page.
When do I need to do that?