5 replies to this topic

[Nick Springer]

I have a PDF that I need to edit in Illustrator that originally came from Arc. The point symbols are of course text elements, but I need to resize them. What I need to know is when Arc exports points where is the actual point? The text anchor point? The center of the symbol (in this case an "X")?

[Hans van der Maarel]

Don't know about Arc, but when doing imports with MAPublisher (older versions), the text anchor was at the actual point.

[CHART]

Anchor point most likely. However depending on the font construction displaying the symbol in the PDF file, the symbol could display dead centre even if the anchor point is lower left.. see symbol font designs. What you need to know is the actual xy of the points... but maybe that is not available?

If I shed some light great... if not disregard...

[Nick Springer]

If it is the anchor point that is good, but that makes me wonder then... wouldn't all Arc exported point symbols be visually mislocated since the symbol is above and to the right of the anchor?

[CHART]

If it is the anchor point that is good, but that makes me wonder then... wouldn't all Arc exported point symbols be visually mislocated since the symbol is above and to the right of the anchor?

Could be, check out the documentation of MapPublisher (version 5 and below) with regards to calculating the displacement. They had an excel file or something like that to calculate the shifting based on pt size.

[Matthew Hampton]

I always select "convert marker symbols to polygons" on export and that produces predictable graphic elements, although this is a very interesting question.

In Illustrator you could "Create Outlines" of the symbol-font before resizing and guarantee proper placement.

I did a quick test to see what happened when you re-size. The green circles are symbol-fonts that I used the "Create Outlines" function in AI and resized to 50%. They maintained their proper position. The red circles are symbol-fonts that I resized from 16pt to 8pt. The baseline didn't shift so they were re-sized from the text anchor.
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