Esri Mapping Center - Ask a Cartographer

Lat long annotation

April 22 2011 | 4 comments
Categories: Data Driven Pages, Page Layout

My question is in regards to automatic annotation of positioning to be displayed in the Layout View (paper space) of a map. Is there a way inside Arc View to do such?

Please see the attachment:

Mapping Center Answer:

You can use Data Driven Pages to create the atlas series. And to automatically insert latitude and longitude at the upper left corner of each map in the layout, you can use dynamic text.

In layout view, click Insert onthe top bar menu, then click Dynamic Text. You will see that you have a number of options. For now, just click any one of the options. This will insert dynamic text on your layout. Place this text at the desired location on the layout and double click the text. This will open the properties dialog box for the text. In the Text space, remove the default syntax and add this:

dyn type="dataFrame" name="DataFrameName" property="upperLeft" units="dms" decimalPlaces="4"/

Enclose this in angle brackets.

This will add upper left coordinates on each page dynamically.

Hope this helps!

Attachment: Question about automatic annotation on Lat. Long positioning.

To continue posted by Peter Goodman on May 2 2011 8:44AM

This works out perfictly! By simply changinging the termanology in the dynamix text to "upper right" etc, I can do all 4 corners.

Now I do ask however is there a way to stack the text as I have it listed in the image, and to remove the "W" and "N"?

Or am I stuck with the unstacked format?

Thank you greatly for this help!

Yes, and no... posted by Aileen Buckley on May 3 2011 4:00PM

Yes, you can stack dyanmic text, just like you would stack regular text in the text property page, but the screen shot looks more like two separate pieces of text, one for the lat and one for the long. This can be done as well with two separate pieces of dynamic text, one formatted for x and the other for y. This is the example for the upper left corner.

dyn type="dataFrame" name="DataFrameName" property="upperLeft.x" units="dms" decimalPlaces="2"/ - all of this encloed in angle brackets

dyn type="dataFrame" name="DataFrameName" property="upperLeft.y" units="dms" decimalPlaces="2"/ - all of this encloed in angle brackets

The following blog post has some additional dynamic text tips and tricks:
http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/arcgisdesktop/archive/2011/03/29/Taking-full-advantage-of-dynamic-text.aspx

We have not been able to determine a way to remove the N and W from these formatting options in the current implementation. We will add that to the enhancement list.