Latest Contributions by JimCousins

This would depend on: Your needs -  do you need to portray accurate area or distance / direction.  Your other data - are your other data layers in x/y coords? it is good practice to try keeping all layers in 1 coord sys Your extents - continental scale is inappropriate for UTM/State Plane, as you will span multiple zones and create distortion.  That said, We work within state plane zones, or UTM zones most frequently, but I am focused on continental US and specific sites / areas within it, and our analyses and model output / input are in feet or meters, and therefore put us into x,y coords and not geographic lat/long. I am sure that the user community will have additional input to this open ended question.... Best Regards, Jim ... View more

A place to start may be the Data Management >> Features >> Minimum Bounding Geometry tool. This will not leave you with territories that share a contiguous boundary, but may provide a solution for the majority of your new locations.  A better solution would be to determine if these territories follow any existing political or physical boundaries, and create polygons from them to use in your analysis, if possible (ie: corporate limits, county boundaries, etc.). Regards, Jim ... View more

It is referring to having different layers in the map with individually different coordinate systems. You can not define multiple coordinate systems for an individual file. Regards, Jim ... View more

Is your map created at the final printing size, or are you creating a map at a smaller size and then attempting to scale it up? If you create a PDF, you can scale up without issue, whereas a tif or other image format does not scale up well.  Or are you saying that your map exported at 1:1 scale is of poor resolution? Regards, Jim ... View more

I don't know what specific properties you wish to compare.  However, the Describe function in arcpy may provide the information you need. A much more basic solution is to open 2 maps, and review the properties that way. Regards, Jim ... View more

I am not familiar with the reference material you mention. However, I typically solve text over imagery issues by using a text halo to provide separation between background (the imagery) and foreground (the text). Best Regards, Jim ... View more

There are 2 tools in Spatial Analyst Tools >> Extraction.  1 is the tool you tried, and another is Extract Values to Points - Try that one. It will return the raster value that the point falls within, and then you can run a summary on the raster value attached to the points, and get your counts. Best Regards, Jim ... View more

This is what the Data Driven Pages toolbar and tool is designed to do. Enable Data Driven Pages, choose your counties layer, check your layout, and then export to PDF, choosing a single page or a page range. Creating Data Driven Pages—Help | ArcGIS Desktop  Regards, Jim ... View more

Ed, Have a look at coordinate geometry (COGO). I have created parcels from similar datasets by hand, using the bearing / distance drawing tool from the edit toolbar, but I do not have an automated solution. Regards, Jim ... View more

why not bypass a template if your datasets are consistent, and save a copy of a stripped down map, and use that mxd as your template instead? Regards, Jim ... View more

You have 2 types of features displayed, points and polygons. Points will maintain their size, but polygons are a fixed diameter and will seem to get larger or smaller as you zoom in and out. Convert your polygons to points, and they will behave as your other point layer does. Regards, Jim ... View more

It seems like there is an issue with your parameter entries.  Try using the Table to Excel tool from the toolbox and see if that provides any insight. Regards, Jim ... View more

1) If you simply need to move the data, start an edit session and select all data and choose "Move" and you can type in an offset. I recommend making a copy of the file first, in case the result is not what you want.  2) Be certain that it is a site coordinate issue, and not a projection or feet to meters issue. Best regards Jim ... View more