{"id":1601,"date":"2017-03-08T20:40:47","date_gmt":"2017-03-08T20:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2023-05-07T03:48:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T03:48:09","slug":"can-i-use-my-own-symbols-on-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/can-i-use-my-own-symbols-on-maps\/","title":{"rendered":"Can I use my own symbols on maps?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post covers how to use your own custom symbols in ArcMap<\/em><\/p>\n

I had a good question in one of my classes recently (thanks Jacque!): can I use my own symbols on maps in ArcMap?\u00a0 Short answer – yes!\u00a0 It may not be as easy as we might like, but it’s certainly doable.\u00a0 We’ll look at two examples – point symbols and area fills.<\/p>\n

Point Symbols<\/strong><\/p>\n

ArcMap has a dizzying array of built-in symbols.\u00a0 We most often access these via the Symbology tab from a layer’s Properties.\u00a0 In the image below I’ve got the Properties window for a layer of GPS points open:<\/p>\n

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If I click on the box in the Symbol area, the Symbol Selector window opens.\u00a0 Here I can change colours and size and pick out a specific symbol:<\/p>\n

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If I also click on Style References, I can add in a huge range of other built in symbols, with over 50 additional sets of more specifically themed symbols:<\/p>\n

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Ticking the grey box at the left of each set makes those symbols available in the Symbol Selector window.\u00a0 But what if, for some reason, you want to use your own symbols?\u00a0 For this we need to click the Edit Symbol button, \"\"<\/a> in the Symbol Selector window.\u00a0 This (as usual) opens up another window:<\/p>\n

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Under “Type” we’ve got several options:<\/p>\n

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With most of these options we can work with existing symbols and edit them.\u00a0 If I want to add my own custom symbol, I can choose the “Picture Marker Symbol” option.\u00a0 I can immediately upload an image then, so let’s use something I can easily put my (digital) hands on – a Lincoln logo as a JPG image:<\/p>\n

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The key here is that if I can use as an image as a symbol (they’re all images, really) which can easily be uploaded to ArcMap and then becomes available.\u00a0 Below, I’ve uploaded my logo and can change its size or angle or offset as I like.\u00a0 When I’m happy, I click OK, then OK again, and I’ve now got my points shown oin the map with this logo (why I would want to do actually this, I don’t know…):<\/p>\n

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Area Fill Symbols<\/strong><\/p>\n

Great.\u00a0 Now what if I want to do the same sort of thing with my area fills?\u00a0 To set this up I’ll first re-symbolise my vegetation layer.\u00a0 I’ve got an attribute called “TYPE” that gives me a description of the different vegetation types so I’ll give each unique value a separate colour:<\/p>\n

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Now I’ll change the colour for my Grassland polygons by double clicking on the colour swatch, then on Edit Symbol, change the Type to Picture Fill Symbol and upload my logo again.\u00a0 Clicking OK to get back to the map I get this:<\/p>\n

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Ummm…interesting to say the least.\u00a0 It hasn’t scaled the image so I’ll need to play around with it a bit to get it to tile nicely.\u00a0 Using Corel Photo Paint I resized the image to a much smaller size and then imported this new version.\u00a0 And here’s the result:<\/p>\n

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Again, why on earth you might want to use this a symbol I can’t even guess, but it does demonstrate how you can relatively easily import an image and use it as symbology on your map.\u00a0 This could be useful when you simply must<\/em> get the texture right for that area fill.<\/p>\n

The way we’ve done things here, our new symbol is only available in this map document.\u00a0 If I wanted to permanently add in my own symbol that’s always available, I can do that as well, but it’s slightly more complicated.\u00a0 Without going into too much detail, I need to go to the Customize (sic) menu > Style Manager and create a new symbol (by uploading my image) in the appropriate folder.\u00a0 Not that hard really – the harder thing in all this is probably creating a symbol from scatch in something like Paint or Photoshop or adapting an existing symbol<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So there you have it – using your own symbols to get that map looking just right.<\/p>\n

C<\/p>\n

GIS Blog Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post covers how to use your own custom symbols in ArcMap I had a good question in one of my classes recently (thanks Jacque!): can I use my own symbols on maps in ArcMap?\u00a0 Short answer – yes!\u00a0 It may not be as easy as we might like, but it’s certainly doable.\u00a0 We’ll look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4139,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions\/4139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}