With Colors Ramp you can create legends with continuous colors ramps. The colors and classes between which you want to create ramps must not be defined manual (in difference to the legend editor), but will be defined automatically.

• The themes which color scales shall be optimized must be active.
• Colors: Choose the color scale you want to use.
• Current Colors: Keep the current colors.
• ArcView Colors: Choose a pre-defined ArcView color scale.
• Theme Colors: Use the colors of any other theme.
• Legend File: Load colors from any existing legend file.
• Flip Order: The order of the color scale will be reversed.


• Click on the button to run the command. When finished, the status bar shows the total number of the optimized colors.

Remarks on color scales, color ranges and their transformation:

• In contrary to the default function of ArcView with 13 colors, the number of colors in the scale can be arbitrary, because they will be adjusted to the number of the classes of the legend. For this either surplus colors will be removed or missing colors repeated in order to create continuous color ramps.
• All sections of identical colors (several classes with the same color) will be converted to continuous color ramps. All other colors that are not repeated, stay untouched.
• Sections of identical colors at the beginning of the legend will be faded starting with the color itself to the next differing color (e.g. 4 times red and 1 time yellow results in red, 3 colors red-yellow and yellow). Identical colors or sections at the end of the legend will be faded by the previous color (e.g. 1 time yellow and 4 time green results in yellow, 3 colors yellow-green and green).
• If the section of identical colors is situated in the middle (with a single color before and after) the upper half will be faded with the color before and the lower half with the color after. The color itself will be preserved at the center of the area (e.g. 1 time red, 5 times yellow and 1 time green results in red, 2 colors red-yellow, yellow, 2 colors yellow-green and green).
• You can define your own color scales by creating and saving legends with any number of classes containing the foreground colors you want (e.g. two classes for a single color ramp between two colors) - background color, symbol, label and classification are of no interest. These "legends" can be loaded as color scales with Legend Load.