We have made several improvements to the legend, when displaying Unique Values base symbology. These improvements can help you communicate your map’s contents more easily and effectively, without the need to manually recreate the legend or use another drawing program.
Improvements include:
- Creating a name for the Unique Values attribute for use in the legend, and using the \name directive in the legend template
- Option for displaying only the properties that are applied in the layer
- Option for changing the line or symbol sample size in the legend
- For polygons, putting the line style around the fill sample (aka patch), using the \linefill directive in the legend
- Setting the alignment for the samples to be left, center, or right
- Option for separating samples on different rows (e.g. if an attribute had both a polygon and polyline feature, they could be displayed on one row in the legend, or separated onto two rows)
Legends for unique values symbology that were once hard to read are now easy to understand!
What is this new feature
These features gives you the ability to create a legend that effectively and easily communicates the data with unique values in your base layer. You can associate each attribute value with a name to display in the legend, you can apply the line properties around the fill patch, only show the properties that are actually applied in the layer, etc.
How to use it
Let's start with creating a base layer with unique values symbology, and then we can see some of the new options.
- Click Home | New Map | Base
- Navigate to the Surfer Samples file in the installation directory (by default ), select NV2010.GSB and click Open.
- Let's convert a couple of the polygons into polylines, just for the sake of this exercise.
- In the Contents window, expand the Base layer, click on the first Polygon in the list, hold the CTRL key down and click on the second polygon in the list.
- Right click over the selection and click Change To | Polyline.
- To apply the symbology, select the Base layer in the Contents window.
- In the Properties window, on the General page, click Edit Symbology.
- In the Symbology dialog, select Unique Values from the list on the left.
- Change the Attribute field to Secondary, and then click the Add All toobar button. All the counties of Nevada are added to the table.
- You can see the line, fill, symbol, value and name. Set any line and fill properties you wish (or just accept the defaults). The Value is the attribute value from the data. You cannot change this. However, you can change the Name. The Name is what will show in the legend, by default. The name may or may not be the same as the actual attribute value. Go ahead and change some of the names for some of the attributes.
- Once you are satisfied with the changes, click OK. The properties are applied to the map.
Now let's add the legend.
- Select the base layer and click Map Tools | Add to map | Legend.
- By default the legend is created below the map. Go ahead and click and drag to move it to the side of the map. You can see that by default:
- The line samples are in the same column as the fill samples (aka. patches)
- The names are displayed next to the samples instead of the attribute value for the symbology
- The line style is surrounding the fill sample for the polygons, instead of displaying next to it
- In the Contents window, select the Legend.
- In the Properties window, click the Layers tab. Here you can play with some of the other additions, such as the Line sample size and the Sample alignment. The symbol size and separating samples do not quite apply to this example.
Pitfall: if you do want to try with your own data with Separate samples on different rows, note that you may need to adjust your Template to account for the changes.
For example, if the template was \linefill \symbol \name and you separated the samples, the name would just be next to the symbol. You would want to include the name for each properties on each row: \linefill \name \symbol \name
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