Ellipses showing on legend

[AvaFarouche]

Hi!

I have a problem with ellipses showing up on my legends. Yes, I know this is supposedly because my text is cut off - but in fact, that's not the case. Getting rid of these often forces me to make legends that are wider than necessary, and that have more empty space on one side than the other, so they look sloppy and unprofessional.

I'm attaching a Word doc that has images of 3 different legends, which are all taken from exported pdf maps.  Number 1 is perfectly fine. Number 2 is the same legend from the same map, but with a different layer turned on.  The ellipses dominate the legend. You can see that there's actually plenty of space available in the legend. Everything I want to display is included, and there is plenty of space to the right of all text. But the ellipses are there, nevertheless.

Legend 3 is the same legend, that I have just expanded width-wise a little bit.  You can see in the background layer that the legend is closer to the word Airport than the other legends, and there is more empty space on the right side of the legend. That got rid of the ellipses, but now there is more extra space in the legend than necessary, and it's not uniform to the space on the left side of the legend, so it looks sloppy.

On top of that, there are times when the ellipses show up in the Layout, but not when I export the map to pdf, and then there are times when they DO show up on the exported map, and that inconsistency is aggravating because I don't know if I can ignore them or not.

This happens ALL the time. In this instance, it doesn't matter too much, other than that it creates an unprofessional looking product, which is embarrassing. But sometimes space is extremely tight in a map, and that matters.

Does anyone have any advice for how to deal with this?

Thank you!  

[AubriKinghorn · Accepted solution]

Hello,

There's a lot going on here, and it all sounds frustrating. I think I might have a few answers for you.

First, the ellipses appear when everything on the legend can't be drawn. This usually means text, but it can also refer to legend items or even set column spacing.

When I get ellipses on my legend but all the text is drawing, I look at the Arrangement tab. If equal columns widths is set and there isn't enough space in the legend bounding box for all the columns to be the same width, the ellipse draws. If word wrapping options are set and the last column is narrow than the total wrapped values (labels + descriptions) then the ellipses draw.

You figured out that resizing it, making the legend wide enough to fit these spaces, makes the ellipses go away. I've used that method before, but sometimes it creates too much blank space like you mentioned. Other things I try are unchecking equal column widths, changing or unchecking the word wrapping values, or changing the fitting strategy altogether. 

Finally, the ellipses should never appear in export, they are information when editing a layout, but should not be in the exported product. If you have cases where this happens, I highly recommend reaching out to technical support so they can log a bug for the development team and get this fixed.

[AvaFarouche]

Thanks very much for your reply, Aubri.

I have this legend set to only 1 column, so I'm having a hard time understanding how any of my settings factor into these ellipses.  The layer that seems to be creating the problem here is the one that's symbolized with graduated colors, and it's the narrowest in the legend. The upper 3 layers take up more width, but they're not causing the problem. It's only when I changed the graduated layer and it takes up slightly more room that I get the ellipses.  I will experiment more with some of the settings you mention, though, and see if I can figure anything out.

But, what you mentioned about exporting is helpful.  I did print that map to pdf, as opposed to exporting it, so I need to make sure I export it. However, that's a separate headache, because my maps look much better when I print to pdf than when I export, and I have tried all sorts of different settings for that and that's another thing I have to spend more time on to try to figure out. >: