ArcGIS Desktop – Handling Dashed Border Lines That Become Solid

arcgis-desktopcartography

I am using Arc 10.3.1 and I am having a cartographic dilemma. As shown in the picture below, I have dashed line representing borders of various city zones. Where these border lines share borders with other polygons the resulting dashed line becomes much thicker and in some cases a completely solid line. I can handle a slight variation in the size of the dashes but a solid line is unacceptable to me.

I have tinkered with changing the outline size and the outline dash type but each time when I export the lines are still merged. I have used definition queries to exclude the polygons in the middle, allowing the outer polygons lines to form the border for the interior ones, but there are several that I can not exclude because they create an outside border on the map that must be shown.

Is there a method to fix this little issue of mine?

Best Answer

Go to ArcToolbox > Cartographic Refinement > Set Representation Control Point At Intersect tool, and run the function on your feature data (after you created a representation for it.) The tool aligns the hash boundary symbology so that when it overlaps it does not look like a solid line.

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ArcGIS Desktop – How to Hide Internal Polygon Boundaries

I cross posted this question on Esri's Ask A Cartographer site. They pointed me to a mostly-suitable workaround: use Symbol Level drawing in general and Dissolving polygon boundaries using symbol level drawing in particular. Likely what Craig was pointing at earlier in his answer. I've seen the dialogs and help topics before but hadn't dug into them because the examples are about cased lines and I didn't understand how the same principles could be applied to polygons. With the v10 help they've greatly expanded the examples and procedures. Although written for a v10 audience it should help v9.x users as well as it hasn't changed that much.

I did finally get Symbol Levels to work with our data in situ (no duplicate feature classes created, no attributes added). There are few inconsistencies in the symbol level interface which add confusion, which I'll mention here (a.k.a. "watch for submerged rocks" and "here be dragons"):

Boundaries don't dissolve when marker or picture fills are used, only plain and gradient fills work
Sometimes editing a symbol causes it to jump to the top of stack (under "Advanced > Symbol Levels") and it's join/merge state change to unchecked.
Sometimes the advanced settings won't "take", try changing the stack order and various applications of enable/disable join/merge.
After enabling Symbol Levels Occasionally the "apply color ramp" step (#17) doesn't work at all. The symbols stick with what is defined in the upper most Edit Symbol dialog. An Arcmap reboot seems to cure it.

A workaround for using marker/picture fills, dissolving all internal boundaries, and drawing outermost perimeter of all objects ("ordinary high water mark" in the sample data (linked to in Q)) is to:

add the layer a second time in the TOC, below the marker/pic fill layer,
Use "Single Symbol", plain fill, enable Symbol Levels, do the same double layer trick as above under advanced symbol properties
and enable both Join and Merge checkboxes (another bug here: sometimes the []Merge box is not enabled until after you go to advanced symbol properties editor.)

Develop the habit of always doublechecking the stack order and the join merge properties. Just because you told it to do/not-do X doesn't mean it actually remembered.

So in summary,for cartographic purposes Symbol Levels with join & merge properties is a workable if quirky analog for Arcinfo Regions. For analytical purposes like "query surface area of ordinary high water" you'll still need to do some geoprocessing and generate duplicate data.

(UPDATE) It is possible after all to use picture symbols, symbol levels, and a single ToC layer. You set your tongue to the right, just so, stand on one leg (doesn't matter which), and face the moon. From here get a map package illustrating two working methods (Lake-cartography-symb-levels - update.mpk).

see full size image

[GIS] Export ArcMap cartographic representation to a symbol

I didn't find a way to export cartographic representation, so that need still remains to be addressed.

I did find a solution that worked for the current project though. My symbol is based on a font glyph, so I used Inkscape to load the font symbol, style it approximately the same as the CR symbol, export as EMF and embed in the map composition via Insert > Picture. I couldn't get a perfect match between the symbols, but it's pretty good.

Open Inkscape, use Type tool (f8)
Insert character symbol, resize to something easy to work with
Open Fill and Stroke palette (shift-ctrl-f)
Set fill to 50% (for this example)
Set stroke to black, and stroke style to desired outline thickness
set Document Properties (shift-ctrl-d) to match Object height & width; this so that when imported to arcmap the symbol's bounding box matched the symbol itself, and not the document page size

Marker Editor property |  Inkscape equivalent
-----------------------|---------------------
Solid colour pattern   |  Fill 
Line                   |  Stroke
Line width             |  Stoke Style

The units for line/stroke width in the two applications bear little to no relationship to each other, so I just aimed for something that looked close (took multiple round trips to get sorted out).

final CR and EMF in Arcmap

In future I think I would explore creating the symbols in Inkscape first, and then using those in Arcmap right from the beginning (though the fact the way to convert .emf to CR markers uses VB6 doesn't bode well for this approach [ref]).

I also tried the speedier route of grabbing a screenshot of the CR symbol, deleting the background, and saving as PNG. However that failed because Arcmap doesn't respect the PNG transparency. (Which is just as well as the picture was kind of ugly anyway.)

Best Answer

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[GIS] Export ArcMap cartographic representation to a symbol

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