Esri Mapping Center - Ask a Cartographer

Street Names are missing the last letter when exporting to Illustrator

February 17 2010 | 4 comments
Categories: Labeling

When I export my map to an Illustrator file a few of my street labels are missing the last letter. For example Orem Blvd becomes Orem Blv. Any idea what is causing this? Also will ArcGIS 10 export to a more up to date Illustrator format?

Mapping Center Answer:

The clipping seems to be a bug that appears to us to happen on the Illustrator side, so we can't really do anything about it.

In ArcGIS 10, we will support the last publically documented version of Illustrator which is version 7 -- if Adobe formally publishes the interchange documents we will certainly update this on our side.

Graphics posted by Chris Mathers on Feb 18 2010 7:37AM

Convert the labels to graphics so that they are just vector objects sitting on your map. That way they won't be changed when you bring the map into another program.

Thanks! posted by Aileen Buckley on Feb 18 2010 9:42AM

This sounds like a good work around -- thanks, Chris!

Workflow posted by Kory Iman on Feb 24 2010 9:03PM

My goal is to develop a work flow that will allow changes to be made in the GIS database and have those changes automatically be updated on the map. Even though changing the labels to graphic might work, it will not help me achieve my goal. The best work around that I have found is to convert the map to a pdf and then open it up in Illustrator and save the map out to an .ai file. Doing so has eliminated the missing label issue. That way the map can be placed into the InDesign template and sent to the press. This work around still has flaws but it eventually gets the job done.

Thanks for the tip! posted by Aileen Buckley on Apr 12 2011 10:44PM

Very helpful - thanks!

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