There are a number of different ways to share maps depending on the purpose you have in mind. You can print on paper or a poster, create an image to embed in a document or a Web page, create a PDF, export to free applications like Google Earth or ArcReader, or upload to a cloud service like ArcGIS.com.
This tutorial will guide you through several ways that you can share the maps you create using ArcMap.
Putting the final touches on a map can make the difference between one that is easily interpretable and one that is useless.
Cartography describes the clear, elegant, and even artful design of a map.
With an appropriate choice of
content, structure, symbology, and labels, a map can
speak volumes while still being easy to read and understand.
A map that is just thrown together may be helpful to
the author, who knows what to look for, but could be
confusing and quickly ignored by an intended audience.
Entire books have been written on designing good maps.
In lieu of reading one of them, here are some
important considerations to keep in mind when preparing
your maps for sharing:
- Color: Choose an appropriate
symbology for your data and background for your
maps that will enhance rather than detract from the
visibility of your data.
There are a number of color standards that people respond to perceptually, e.g. darker colors for larger numbers, and others that they expect, e.g. green for forest areas, etc.
Colorblindness also prevents some people from distinguishing certain colors. So it’s a good idea to pick your color combinations carefully. Visit http://colorbrewer2.org/ for some ideas.
Also note that many journals still only publish black-and-white
maps, which may require simplification.
- Contrast: More generally, the different
elements of your map need to be distinguishable from each other.
Pick symbols, labels, and graphic element backgrounds so that
they are visible when they overlap.
- Scale: Usually you will want to
use a scale such that your data or important
background elements have maximal magnification and
are centered. If printing on paper, use the dialog
Page and Print Setup…
to orient the paper
as portrait or landscape to match the data.
- Projection: This is a topic that will be
discussed later,
but in most cases it’s important to use an appropriate
projection that reduces distortion of shape and area over the
region of interest, if possible.
When you publish your map to static formats such as paper,
digital images, or PDF, you’ll need to define a size
for the output, which you can think of simply as the “paper size”.
and proceed in the usual way to choose
Printer,
Paper Size,
Paper Orientation, etc.
Letter-size paper is likely the default, and is good for most
images. But if you are planning to print a poster, you should
click on the button Advanced
- In
 ArcMap, select the menu File, and click on the menu item Page and Print Setup….
- The first time you save your map document, the dialog Save As will appear. It’s highly advised that you navigate to the same folder containing the shape files you’ve added to the map, in this case
 constructingmaps.
- Your map document will have a file extension of
.mxd .
Choose a root name describing your project, e.g.
states, and click the button Save.
To see how your map will look on the printed page, menu View > Layout View. This displays the map in a ”box” inside the margins of the paper type chosen. You can change the size of the box by clicking on them and dragging one of the aqua boxes to a new position. Note the thin gray dotted line; it shows the actual limits to printing on the paper size for the printer you’ve chosen.
The map as displayed in the margins is the same one you’ve chosen in the data view, no matter how big or small the margins are. You can use the same tools in the toolbar Tools to change the relative size and position of the map within those margins. Important: in the Layout View, you should have access to the toolbar Layout, which provides similar tools that reference the paper rather than the map — with them you can zoom into the paper without changing the size of the map relative to the paper.
Before sharing your map, it’s a good cartographic
practice to add a number
of additional elements that help explain the map,
which only appear in the Layout View:
- Legend: A list of the layers in the map and the
symbols used to display them. The names of data layers will be
visible in the legend, so make sure they are not the default
abbreviated names. Click-pause-click to rename them (don’t
double-click, since that opens the Properties dialog).
- North Arrow or Compass Rose:
- Scale Bar;
- Titles and Captions: In most cases
the map itself should also have a descriptive title.
- Graphics: Other graphic elements are often useful,
such as arrows to point out particular features, and can be
added using the Draw toolbar.
- Inset Map: For larger-scale maps, it can be helpful
to include a small-scale map as an inset to provide a
locational context within a more well-know geography,
e.g. a particular region within New England.
a title, a legend to describe the different
layers, a north arrow to show directions, and a
scale bar to show the map scale:
- Go to the menu Insert and
select the menu item Title,
and a text box will appear near the top center of the screen.
Enter a title and drag the box to an appropriate position.
- Next go again to the menu Insert
and this time select the menu item Legend.
Take all the defaults by clicking the button Next on each of the series of screens.
Drag the legend to an appropriate place and resize it if necessary.
- Now menu Insert and select the menu
item North Arrow...; choose your
preferred style, click the button OK,
and then move the arrow where you would like it.
- Finally menu Insert and then select
the menu item Scale Bar...; choose
your preferred style, click the button OK,
and then move the scale bar where you would like it. Note that
by default the scale uses whatever the map units are;
you can change that by double-clicking on the bar and
choosing a different one.
If necessary, resize the margins around the map to fit these new additions.
ArcMap can have multiple data frames defined in its
Table of Contents, but only one of them can be displayed
at a time in the Data View.
However, layouts can
display the maps from all frames at once,
for example to show an overview map in an inset box.
The most basic way to share maps is to save them in one of the file formats commonly found on the Internet.
Go to the menu File and choose the menu item Export Map.... Then navigate to the folder in which you want to save the map.
If your intent is to use the map on a computer, such as in a web page or a PowerPoint presentation, where printing is a secondary consideration:
- If you have raster images in your map, select
JPEG as the format; it will provide lossy but excellent compression.
- Otherwise choose
PNG, which produces good compressed files from vector graphics (it also does a reasonable job on raster graphics).
Choose an image resolution of about 100 dots per inch (dpi), good for display on most computers.
If your intent is to use the map in a paper or a poster that will be printed, for example with Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign, you will want to save it in an image format that preserves lots of detail; TIFF works well. Choose a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
If you would like the map to be a stand-alone document, then the Acrobat format PDF is a good choice. These files can be easily displayed by most people with the Adobe Reader software, and it’s readily downloaded by web browsers. PDF will preserve more of the details of the map, and so it’s a good way to distribute it if it will later be printed. A PDF map even provides some degree of interactivity, e.g. turning layers on and off. Important: make sure you click on the tab Format and then choose the checkbox Embed All Document Fonts; this will help keep the document readable by everyone.
Experiment: Try producing all three of these file formats, and compare them. In the PDF document, note the tab on the left called Layers; click on it and then click on the “eye” icon next to one of your layers, and observe what happens.
The free application Google Earth has become very popular, as it provides
imagery of the Earth’s surface
(taken from airplanes or satellites) in an easy-to-access format — if you
have an internet connection.
It’s also a lot of fun to use, as you can zoom around the Earth and view it from different perspectives, including terrain and buildings in 3D!
ArcGIS is a useful program to create additional layers that can be viewed in Google Earth.
Exporting to Google Earth makes use of a special geoprocessing tool, an extra program that transforms geographic data into new formats from which additional information can be extracted.
Geoprocessing tools are stored in a collection called ArcToolbox.
The next two procedures are preliminary steps useful for most geoprocessing activities.
By default geoprocessing tools run in the background so that you can continue using ArcMap for other things, but it’s harder to monitor and there can be occasional failures that don’t otherwise occur. So until you’re used to these tools, it’s better to run them in the foreground, even though it will then be the only thing that ArcGIS is doing.
- Menu Geoprocessing, then select the menu item Geoprocessing Options….
- In the dialog Geoprocessing Options, in the area Background Processing, click off the checkbox
 Enable.
- Click on the button OK.
Google Earth uses a geographic format known as Keyhole Markup Language, KML for short, which is sometimes compressed to a smaller size using ZIP compression to produce a KMZ file. ArcToolbox provides tools to export both individual layers as well as entire maps.
- In ArcMap, open
 ArcToolbox
as described in the previous procedure.
- Click on
 Conversion Tools, then on To KML, and finally on Layer to KML.
- In the dialog Layer to KML, there are a number of fields that let you specify the items you want to process and any information that may be required.
Note the button Show Help >>, which opens the right-hand panel to provide an explanation of the purpose of the tool and, when you click on each item, what it is expected:
In the field/menu  Layer,
select a layer or map to export, e.g.  USA
Major Rivers.
- In the menu Output File,
choose the output path of the file you want to create, e.g. rivers.kmz; it’s usually easiest to click on the button
 Browse to choose a folder and the name and type of the file.
- Click the button OK; when geoprocessing is run in the foreground, a dialog will appear describing the process and listing any errors that occur:
When geoprocessing is run in the background, to see the results or any errors you must menu Geoprocessing, then select the menu item Results.
 Click the button Close to dismiss the dialog.
- Navigate to the folder where you stored the KMZ file, and double-click on it to open it in Google Earth.
When the layer appears in Google Earth, you should be to see the
labels when you zoom in far enough, and an information
balloon should appear when you click on any
feature. Note that the labels are stored as a
separate layer from the features, so you can
click them off if
you want to.
- The KMZ file can also be displayed in the World-Wide Web site Google Maps by first putting it in own your Web site, copying its Web address (URL), and then visiting http://maps.google.com/ and
pasting the URL in the field
 Search.
The button  Link will provide a URL for the Google map with your layer added, allowing you to share it.
It is also possible to create an interactive map that allows the viewer
of the map to explore it by zooming and viewing attributes, very similar
to what you have been doing already with ArcMap.
Such interactive maps use the free program ArcReader, though it’s only
available for Windows.
Creating an ArcReader map is described in a separate section on using ArcPublisher.
Exercises
If you are interested in applying what you’ve learned to some slightly
different kinds of maps, here are some additional exercises.
They use map files in the exercises folder
in the Introduction to GIS folder.
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