Legend has white space on one side

[lothlorien227]

When I create a legend it creates extra white space on the right side. The gap adjustments or changing the fitting strategy don't seem to fix this. Any thoughts? (see pic)

[JuliaOlson]

Hi Lothlorien227,

Thanks for reaching out! It definitely looks like there might be a bug in the software that's not allowing you to remove that extra white space from the legend. I was able to reproduce what you were seeing using a raster layer with the Unique Values renderer.

I'll be investigating this issue but if this is something you'd like to track, I encourage you to contact support. They are better equipped to handle any troubleshooting steps and gather bug data if needed. They can be contacted at https://support.esri.com/en/contact-tech-support.

In the meantime, if your legend is going to be static, a workaround would be to make the background of your legend transparent, insert a new Rectangle shape from the Graphics and Text gallery, resize it to the desired width, and place the legend on top. You can then group the two elements together (Legend and Rectangle) to keep them as one object going forward.

Hope this helps,

Julia

[MelissaNorthey]

I'm seeing the same behavior here and think I've seen and touched every setting known to man in the legend properties to no avail.  Did this get anywhere since December?  I'm on the current version, 3.1.2

[lothlorien227]

I haven't had an update. 😞

[MelissaNorthey]

Hmm, okay, well I just filled that whitespace with a north arrow and some project text.  A co-worker said they went old-school and made their own graphic box and centered the legend content over that rather than use the background of the legend.  We have to get creative for now I guess.

[JuliaOlson]

Hi Lothlorien227 and MelissaNorthey,

I'm happy to get back to you with an update. I've spent some time looking at this issue and with the information provided, I don't believe there's a bug in the software.

When I was able to reproduce in December, I had word wrapping enabled for the labels in the Legend and I'm wondering if that's where you're running into an issue.

This is a Legend with a white background where the word wrapping is enabled for the labels and descriptions. When word wrapping is enabled, the white space is maintained even when you try and resize the legend. 

When you disable the word wrapping for the labels, the white background resizes to the size of the longest piece of text in the legend.

Here's the help topic for formatting text in a legend Format text in a legend—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation, which should answer any other questions you have about word wrapping.

Hopefully this helps! If this still doesn't fix the issue you're seeing, I recommend contacting support and submitting a bug at https://support.esri.com/en/contact-tech-support. 

- Julia

[MelissaNorthey]

That was it, Julia!  Thank you.  The checkboxes in ArcGIS Pro are like a missing semi colon in code - tiny but powerful.