Latest Contributions by JimW1

6. Embark upon a life-long campaign of writing down your own color numbers that give you the colors you want from YOUR monitors to YOUR printers/plotters. Compare them to the Pantone Process Guides, and make lists or tables of what values you enter in ArcMap will actually give you what matches to Pantone, or your company/agency logo, or whatever color standards your being compelled to match to. This one made me laugh out loud. I have post-it notes on my cubicle with the corporate logo colours in my modified HSV to match the POS HP colour laser we have. ... View more

In designing maps to print with ArcGIS 10, is it important to begin the design with CMYK colors, or is it just as good to design in RGB and then convert to CMYK when exporting to PDF? In my experience if working in a CMYK colour space is important to your printout then it is worthwhile doing everything in CMYK. I have found most printers do not really do colour handling well unless they were designed for colour matching. I have found HP Sublimation printers need to use CMYK outputs while HP colour lasers are horrible at colour matching and it doesn't matter what you use. I personally work with HSV as it is easier to choose complimentary and contrasting colour schemes and I find the HSV outputs as fairly consistent when exported to PDF and/or printed. They are not perfect colour matches though. I have also found that if you make your layout using RGB colours that when you set the outputs to CMYK colours the outputs do not look the same as your screen. So my advice is that if you are looking for the best colour matching I would start in CMYK and export/print in CMYK to save yourself "that colour doesn't look right" conversations down the road. My nemisis is Pantone 300. ... View more

Jim - right click on the data frame and choose Properties from the context menu.  Click the General tab and towards the bottom, click the dropdown for Label Engine and select ESRI Standard Label Engine.  Voila - back to standard labeling. Hope this helps, Robert LeClair Esri-Denver Thanks Robert. This work like a charm after an ArcGIS restart. Oddly enough one of my colleagues opened the same MXD and the standard label engine defaulted on its own. ... View more

I tried to hack my around the PDF outputs but never found anything useful. I would suggest setting markers at set reference points on each of your maps using the draw toolbar. If you place a marker in the 'Data View' you can then set its location via the properties dialogue. Change the marker to a 'Character Marker Symbol' and then I usually use ESRI Default Marker (Unicode) 65 as a registration marker. In AI, they can use these registration marks to align each map fairly easily and usually with minimal error (especially if you are out sourcing). The AI operator can then just turn off the registration marks before printing. If you're ambitious make a point layer and set the symbology to the same markers. ... View more

As far as I know you cannot make the extent indicator background transparent. For a workaround, I'd suggest picking a marker fill symbol background. In my example, I used a 1pt circle marker with 2pt of separation (it's a mega-zoomed inset map). You could use other symbols for more bleed-through but this is what I've used in the past when transparency is not an option. Line fills look okay too depending what your underlying data looks like. ... View more

When limited to an ArcView licence I've used the following trick: -Make a point featureclass from the layer you want to annotate (e.g. Parcel Centroids) -Only keep a unique ID field in the new layer -Join the unique ID of the point layer back to the base layer -Use a join field to label the points -Set the label properties to be directly over the point and to overlap everything -Move the points to move the labels -set the symbology of the points to be clear/null/Size 0 The labels will draw and if the underlying data gets changed the labels are populated by the join field. As long as the unique identifier stays static you can reporduce a bunch of Annotations without Editor. Sure you lose some fidelity but that's better than convincing a PM or Director into forking out another $5000. You can port the psuedo-annos from MXD to MXD by saving them in a .lyr file. I just tested it in Arc10 on a AV... still works ... View more

Is it possible to format a field that was created and calculated in a model so I do not have to manually format it after the model is ran?  My model does an acreage calculation and I would like it to calculate to only two decimal places.  It currently defaults to six decimals.  Any help is appreciated.  Thanks in advance. You could play with the parameters but I'd just run a second 'Calculate Field' on the [acres] field with a ROUND() [acres] = round([acres],2) ... View more

Just some thoughts: The script you linked allows a random X or Y offset up to 10m but doesn't check if the absolute offset is greater than 10m. For example, a Y offset of 9m with a X offset of 8m gives an offset of ~12m. I used to have VBA code that then looped the resulting offset to check if it was greater than the max dist and re-ran the randomizer but VBA is dead so that would be a waste of your time. You'd have to code the same kind of error-checker into the python script. I do something similar but with client data so for you I'd suggest: -Take your geocoded patient point file and add the centroid coordinates from the census block (join the census block data to the patient layer or spatial join if you geocoded to addresses) -Make a XY event from the table of the geocoded based on the centroid values (to keep your source data intact) -Add the randomizer script to model builder and run the XY even through the script -Spatial join the randomized points to the census blocks -Make two outputs- Matches to Census Blocks, Do not Match -export the records that match the census block to an intermediate dataset -take the remaining incorrectly placed patient points and re-run them through the randomizer step -Spatial join again to export out the correctly placed points -Then repeat the loop until the incorrect count is zero You should be able to do all that in Model builder without coding (but don't quote me on that). I can't help with the Python... I'm loyal to VBA ... View more

Since loading SP3 I have had some issues with labels disappearing. I know the cause of the error but not the cure. Say my label expression is: [Name] & vbnewline & [ID] Somewhere in my work the label expression changes on its own to: [sde.sde.Stores.Name] & vbnewline & [sde.sde.Stores.ID] Then at some point the labels start to fail so I have to manually erase the [sde.sde.] prefix to fix them. I routinely turn on and off definition queries and use joins so I'm sure the cause is one of those but this only started in Arc10 SP3. I'm thinking maybe the reverse solution to my problem might help. Add in the layer name to the label expressions. ... View more

I'm currently helping out my Dad create some maps for where he hunts. So far I've created a map including contour lines, rivers, NLCD, and roads. Since this map is of an entire county (1:275,237 scale) and the contour interval is only 2 meters I need some up close maps (1:10,000 scale). I was hoping to split the map into side by side squares which can be labeled with X and Y coordinates the way road maps are typically organized. What version of ArcGIs are you using? If it is 9.3.1 and below then download something called DS Mapbook. If it is Arc10 you'll need to use the 'Data Drvien Pages' interface. Either way just make a grid of polygons to make the map pages. There are a bunch of ways to do that easily - DS Mapbook will make it for you and in Arc10 there is a 'Grid Index' tool. It's pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I'd say the DS Mapbook extension is the better of the two systems but for simple stuff Data Driven pages is fine - more complicated stuff requires python code knowledge. Happy hunting... I've been asked more than a few times by friends to do this kind of thing for their hunting trips. ... View more

OMG, I'm new to modelbuilder and I think I made a huge error.  I used the JoinField tool instead of the AddJoin tool because I couldn't figure out why I couldn't do what I thought the AddJoin tool should have been able to do.  So, now I can't seem to RemoveJoin -- what's a newbie to do? And thanks for all this other good stuff.  I think I can set it up right now but it would be nice if the AddJoin worked correctly. New to ModelBuilder not New to ArcGIS; I just finally have a little time to play and get in trouble!:) Oh I hate to say it but from my experience your only recourse is to delete the joined fields or revert back to an older version of your data. I've done the same thing one foggy Monday morning at least once 🙂 ... View more

I haven't used Model Builder really at all, I was wondering if someone could help me out. I have polygons in five different regions of the state and want to merge them all into one statewide coverage. I am trying to do this through model builder by using the merge branch, the model appears to run however I see no output and I am unable to browse to select an output. Any help would be much appreciated. Try 'Merge' and not 'Merge Branch' ... View more