9 replies to this topic

[Neal P. Sharma]

Hi All,

Today a curious thing was happening to me as I was preparing a map. I had two shapefile polylines and set them to the same width, color, and transparency, yet they repeatedly displayed differently on the screen in ArcView 9.3 as well as when exported as a PDF. Has anyone encountered this before? As always, I would greatly appreciate any insights.

Cheers,
Neal

[Neal P. Sharma]

Hi All,

Today a curious thing was happening to me as I was preparing a map. I had two shapefile polylines and set them to the same width, color, and transparency, yet they repeatedly displayed differently on the screen in ArcView 9.3 as well as when exported as a PDF. Has anyone encountered this before? As always, I would greatly appreciate any insights.

Cheers,
Neal

I may have some insight on this thanks to one of my most admired colleagues: She has heard that the appearance of a polyline can be influenced by the appearance of a layer with transparency on it if that layer is "above" the polyline. This would be apparent when the map is exported to PDF. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

[David Medeiros]

Hi All,

Today a curious thing was happening to me as I was preparing a map. I had two shapefile polylines and set them to the same width, color, and transparency, yet they repeatedly displayed differently on the screen in ArcView 9.3 as well as when exported as a PDF. Has anyone encountered this before? As always, I would greatly appreciate any insights.

Cheers,
Neal

It might be best to start with a screen shot so we can see exactly what is going on. Transparent layers over the road lines can obviously affect their appearance, but not the line style. A definition query might change what you see. But that should only be an issue if you're working with an existing layer that already had the query in it (otherwise you'd have been the one making the query).

Also Arc's line style UI can be fairly deep and while the top level setting may be the same you may have gone in deeper at one point and applied other changes to the advanced line style settings. It's worth going in there as well and making sure that everything is the same at all levels through the symbology interface.

Let us see what it looks like and maybe we can figure out other possibilities.

[DaveB]

I may have some insight on this thanks to one of my most admired colleagues: She has heard that the appearance of a polyline can be influenced by the appearance of a layer with transparency on it if that layer is "above" the polyline. This would be apparent when the map is exported to PDF. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Transparency, certain marker symbols and 1 or other things can force all layers from the affected layer and below to be rasterized. This can affect the appearance of lines, so that's a possibility.

[Jon B Ball]

I may have some insight on this thanks to one of my most admired colleagues: She has heard that the appearance of a polyline can be influenced by the appearance of a layer with transparency on it if that layer is "above" the polyline. This would be apparent when the map is exported to PDF. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Transparency, certain marker symbols and 1 or other things can force all layers from the affected layer and below to be rasterized. This can affect the appearance of lines, so that's a possibility.

I don't think that these kind of transparency issues affect on-screen display within ArcMap? It is only on export that these become aparrent....

[DaveB]

I don't think that these kind of transparency issues affect on-screen display within ArcMap? It is only on export that these become aparrent....

That's true. I was concentrating too much on the "exported to PDF" part.

[David Medeiros]

I may have some insight on this thanks to one of my most admired colleagues: She has heard that the appearance of a polyline can be influenced by the appearance of a layer with transparency on it if that layer is "above" the polyline. This would be apparent when the map is exported to PDF. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Transparency, certain marker symbols and 1 or other things can force all layers from the affected layer and below to be rasterized. This can affect the appearance of lines, so that's a possibility.

I don't think that these kind of transparency issues affect on-screen display within ArcMap? It is only on export that these become aparrent....

The only effect on screen would be the obvious lightening of s line under a semi transparent layer. Ratserization only happens on export, and neither will change the actual line symbol style which I read as the real problem?

[DaveB]

These are all just shots in the dark, without having a more precise description (or screenshot) of the issue. Could be there is some difference in data frame reference scales and/ or map scale? Could be this, could be that. Who knows.

[Jon B Ball]

Agreed, Dave. The situation reminds me of when my toilet was broken... nothing much to go on Maybe its fixed already as we are not hearing much from the original poster?

[Neal P. Sharma]

Hi All,

Apologies for dropping off the thread - I have been preoccupied with other projects for the last while. I do believe the problem I was having came from poorly organized map layers i.e. a higher level layer influencing the appearance of a polyline upon export to pdf.

Once I sorted through the map layers and their settings I made sure the polyline was "on top" and things seemed to be fine.

Thank you all for your thoughts.

Regards,
Neal