Abstract:
ArcView 3.0 provides a wealth of symbols, fonts and color choices.
However, the colors you see on the screen are not the same as
will be produced by your hardcopy printer or plotter. How many
times have you selected a beautiful set of coordinated colors
on the screen and produced a terrible looking hardcopy plot? Toresolve
the issue, you could use trial and error to select the appropriate
colors, with the associated cost of several reams of paper, packages
of ink cartridges, and your time. You could use the hardware color-wheel
test plots which taunt you with colors you could produce, but
how do you match those colors to the selectionsin ArcView?
To address these issues and eliminate the frustration of what-you-see-isn't-what-you-get,
we developed an Avenue application which will create a set of
plotfiles which replicate each of the currently available symbol,
color, line, and font palettes. The user can choose the plot page
size, the format of the plotfile (PostScript, CGM, etc.), and
the name of the palette to plot (current, single or all available).
The output is formatted in columns to match the scrolling, on
screen palettes in ArcView. Submitting the plotfiles to your hardcopy
device will produce an exact replica of the ArcView color charts.
From the hardcopy pages, you can choose a color and find the matching
color choice in ArcView. We have found this most valuable when
clients need to choose map color combinations. If they have a
color chart in their office, they can make their choices over
the phone.
Description
ArcView GIS; Version 3.0 provides a wealth of symbols, fonts,
and color choices. This new release offers additional flexibility
over previous versions by allowing true type fonts to be imported
as symbol sets.
Problem
This wide variety of symbol choices should allow the user
to quickly produce beautiful maps. This is not always the case.
With the tremendous number of different printers, and color printer
drivers, we have found that the odds of producing a hardcopy plot
with the same colors as they appeared on the screen are quite
slim. How many times have users selected a beautiful set of coordinated
colors on the screen, and ended up seeing a terrible looking plot
when it printed? One example of an extreme difference is a gray
color in ArcView's "default.apr" that ends up being
a very nice light green on our Hp650C. We have ended up using
this color quite often on plots for environmental applications,
but never would have known it was there without stumbling onto
it after many test plots. To resolve this issue, the user can
use trial-and-error to come up with appropriate colors, but end
up wasting a lot of paper, ink, and staff time. Color-wheel test
plots that printers produce are not a solution, because the user
can't tell which colors on the test plot correspond to the colors
in ArcView's Symbol Palette.
Solution
While we cannot make the printer's color drivers match what is
on the screen in the Symbol Palette, we have come up with an Avenue
solution to at least help the user pick the symbols that will
end up printing better. The quality of the hardcopy is what is
important, even if the symbols look bad on the screen. Our scripts
will replicate the Symbol Palette's symbol sets on a hardcopy,
so that the user can see how each color, fill, line, and marker
symbol will appear on the plotter. By keeping a copy of this hardcopy
output handy, the user can know what symbol to choose, even if
it looks ugly on the screen. The script loads all the symbol sets
located in the Arcview symbol directory ($AVHOME/symbols). It
then prints out a sample of each symbol. Since they are coming
out on the user's own printer, the user can see how each symbol
will look on their own device. The software will either print
out the guides in a poster format (that could be hung on the wall
near the plotter), or in an 8.5 X 11" format (for a booklet
that could be distributed to users). The tool also will load all
symbolsets into your Symbol Palette, a function that is very convenient,
if you have ever gotten tired of having to load each set one by
one manually!
Greg Coniglio
GIS Analyst/Programmer
GIS Resource Group, Inc.
21 S. Grove Street, Suite 130
East Aurora, New York 14052
Phone: (716) 655-5541
Fax: (716) 655-5540
E-mail: greg@gisrg.com