Chapter 22: Layouts

A layout arranges other ArcView documents for printing. It may also contain additional graphical elements such as scale bars, north arrows, text, images, and geometric shapes (drawing objects). If you are familiar with any presentation graphics program, such as Microsoft Powerpoint, then creating and modifying layouts will be easy to learn and to do.

You will discover through experience the many aspects of layouts that do not work correctly: the lack of control over the appearance of a table, the inability to rotate views to fit the map better, the need to rework a layout whenever the printer or page size changes, the long printing times (or outright failures) when printing large or high-resolution maps, and so on. Despite these limitations, with care and perseverance you can make very high-quality maps.

Here, we focus on some of the issues that reveal some more general principles to making maps and creating good hardcopy.

Things to watch out for

	Making a good layout is hard work. Save this work until everything else is just right--the analysis is done, the data are in the right formats, the themes are symbolized and labeled appropriately--to minimize the amount of rework you will have to do. Do your best to do it right the first time, but always plan to throw one away is a good motto.
	Bear constantly in mind that what you add to a layout is special--it belongs to the layout alone and is difficult to share with other ArcView documents or other software, is difficult to modify, and cannot be used for GIS queries or analyses. If you find yourself creating useful data in a layout, then stop and think about where in the database it really belongs. For example, it is almost always unwise to place labels on top of a viewframe in a layout. The labels belong in the view (where they will scale and move with changes in viewpoint) and, usually, they should be put into the view using the labeler tool after you have entered them as attributes into a theme table.
	The beautiful thing about an ArcView layout is its dynamism: it will automatically change to reflect changes in the features and data. This can be a pitfall, too: if what you need is an historical record of what the GIS database looked like at a certain point, then you will have to back up not only the ArcView project but also all the data with which it is associated. This can be difficult and time-consuming.
	Layouts are an excellent medium for creating not only hardcopy but also graphics metafiles. These are graphics files you can incorporate into other software. In ArcView, check out the many possible formats (and their options) in the File\|Export menu item. (I have had the best luck with Windows Metafile formats (a vector format, essentially, but capable of decent raster representation), which can be imported into an html editor, word processor, or presentation package, and with JPEG files (a purely raster format), for which you can set very high resolutions and moderate quality levels.
	The most basic and most important operations for arranging graphics on a page are grouping, spacing, and ordering. ArcView groups and spaces graphics in the Graphics\|Align dialog (ctrl-A). Experiment with this dialog until you are sure of its functions and comfortable using it.

One more time, just for emphasis: if it's data, put it in the database; if it's decoration, put it in the layout.

Alternatives to printing

Things to try (exercises) and to think about

Select a layout object. What do the arrow keys on the keyboard do? What might this be good for?
When you "simplify" a viewframe or other layout object in a frame, it loses its live link to the original document. Can you get this link back? (Hint: what happens if you group the pieces of the "simplified" object?)
Can you have two or more viewframes for the same view in a single layout?
Tables in layouts look horrible. If you want to show data from an ArcView table in a layout, what other techniques can you use that might do a better job? (Think about how using other software might help you with this.)
The Lie Factor in a quantitative graphic (like a map) is the maximum discrepancy between any quantity the graphic appears to display and its actual value (Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information). (The best one can do is 1.0; larger lie factors reflect distortion in the graphic.) For example, the height of the bar for Alberta population (785,000) in the chart of Exercise 22b is 0.14 inches (in my version of the layout), so this bar's implicit scale is 785,000/0.14 = 5.6 million people per inch, approximately; the bar for Toronto's population (3,430,000) is 1.50 inches high, giving an implicit scale of 2.3 million people per inch. These are the two extremes, so the chart's lie factor is 5.6 : 2.3 = 2.5, approximately. (Not bad, but not very good, either.) What is the Lie Factor for the Canada map (including the scalebar)? Hint: this question is really asking how inaccurate the scale bar is.
Apart from actually printing out the layout, how could you--with high accuracy (say, three significant figures)--measure the heights of the chart's bars in question 5?