Arc4You Legends 1.0 - General Information

All Arc4You legend functions work with the active themes of a view. The themes must therefore be selected before calling an Arc4You legend function (by pressing the shift key several themes can be activated or deactivated). If no theme is active, the functions are not available. Some functions support only particular types of themes. They are only available if at least one theme of the required type is active.

What you can do with Arc4You Legends:

• The following standard functions of ArcView are improved:
  The default legend of a grid is automatically loaded when added to the view.
  The default colormap of an image is automatically loaded when added to a view.
  Display grids as image themes with their original colors (without Spatial Analyst) - the grid legend is automatically converted to a colormap (integer grids only).
  Convert images to grids with their original colors (Spatial Analyst required) - the colormap is automatically converted to a grid legend (single band images only).
• Legend Restore: Restore a previous state of one of your legends (e.g. 3 weeks old).
  Undo the last operation(s) when you have modified or even destroyed a legend.
• Legend Backup: Save legends of all themes or views of your project in the backup file or deactivate the automatic backup.
  Create a new or use a different backup file that can be accessed by all users.
  Define that a legend shall stay in the backup file for only 30 days or an unlimited duration.
  Define that a maximum of 50 legends shall remain per theme in the backup file (i.e. 50 changes can be redone).
  
• Legend Copy: Copy a legend of one theme to (many) others at a single step.
  Copy legends between themes of different type (convert them as far as possible):
  feature legends to grid themes (or vice versa),
  single band image colormap to grid theme legend (or vice versa),
  polygon legend to polyline or point themes (or vice versa - colors only),
  polyline legend to point themes (or vice versa - colors and symbol size).
• Legend Transfer: Transfer only the colors/symbols of a legend to the corresponding classes of another legend (without loosing their labels).
  Transfer only the labels of a legend to the corresponding classes of another legend (without loosing their colors/symbols).
  Ensure that two legends have the same labels (but different colors/symbols) or have the same colors/symbols (but different labels).
• Legend Load: Load the default legend of many themes at a single step.
  Load a single legend file for many themes at a single step.
  Load ARC/INFO colormap files for your image themes (single band images only)?
  Load legend files of other theme (feature - grid - image) or shape types (polygon - polyline - point) by converting them as far as possible (see Legend Copy).
• Legend Save: Save the default legend of many themes at a single step.
  Save the colormap of image themes as ARC/INFO colormap files (single band images only).
• Legend Import: Make a legend from a list of values (Text, dBase or INFO Table) - a legend class is created for each record.
• Legend Export: Export the classes of a legend as a definition table or list of values for use in other applications (e.g. MS Excel, Access or Word).
  Export interval classifications (Min - Max) into a table with separated [Min] and [Max] fields instead of a single string field.
  Export disjoint classifications (e.g. 1, 2, 3) into a table with multiple records (each record containing a single value).
• Legend Build: Classify many themes with the same classification method and parameters at a single step.
  Create automatic classifications (equal area/quantile or natural breaks) for floating point or long integer grids (without a value attribute table).
  Classify themes only for a defined range of values (and ignore all values smaller than a minimum and/or larger than a maximum).
  Classify themes with an initial open class (all values smaller than a minimum value) and/or a final open class (all values larger than a maximum value).
  Create classes with a fixed interval size and as many classes as necessary to cover all values (a new method called Fixed Interval Classification) - instead of creating a defined number of classes (Equal Interval method in ArcView) unable to define the size of the intervals (depending on the range of values).
• Legend Sort: Sort the classes of a legend by their value, label, brightness, color hue or symbol size (You surely don't have large or chaotic legends?! :-)
  Move new classes to their correct position/order in the legend (you don't have to play the 'move them up' game in the Legend Editor when adding new classes).
  Check large legends for similar colors (colors that can't be distinguished when displayed side by side) - just sort them by hue (and get shocked).
• Legend Limit: Remove all unused classes from your legends (only the classes with features in the shapefile or cell values in the grid theme will remain).
  Limit the classes of a legend to display only the selected features or grid values (in order to hide the other values without changing the definition bitmap).
  Limit the classes of a legend to the features or grid values visible in the current extent (in order to keep the legend in the layout as short as possible).
• Legend Extend: Check if there are some feature or grid values that are not covered by the legend.
  Add all the missing feature or grid values to your legend.
• Legend Repair: You tried to define a range class for string values (e.g. from "A" to "B") instead of a single value ("A - B") - but all the tricks with * jokers (ArcView Help) didn't work? Split all string classes containing " - " into a range class ("min" - "max").
• Colors Ramp: You have made a graduated color legend with more than 13 classes in the Legend Editor and want to remove the identical colors by creating a continuous color range (with two mouse clicks only)?
  You have defined a color ramp for a theme and want to use it for other themes (even if they have a different number of classes)?
  Define your own color ramps (consisting of as many colors you want - e.g. 2 or 50) and save them for further use.
• Colors Adjust: Increase the brightness of all colors when the printout of your layout was too dark.
  Reduce the red component of all foreground colors when the printout of your layout was too reddish.
• Colors Palettize: You have defined your own colors and want to copy them to other classes or use them in other legends?
  New legend colors are added to the ArcView color palette (Symbol Window).

Hints to Backup and Restore Legends:

When you have loaded Arc4You Legends every change in a legend that is done by a default function of ArcView (i.e. opening the legend editor by double clicking on a theme) or by the extended functions of Arc4You legends is automatically recorded in a backup file. Therefore every change can be undone! This doesn't work with changes that are made by other Avenue scripts or other extensions.

The backup is by default created in a temporary file (environment variable $HOME) and consists of the files avlbak.lbf (legend backup file - contains the merged ASCII text of the legend files) and avlbak.lbx (legend backup index - contains references to the stored legends including name of project, view and theme, backup date and time).

A backup file keeps by default the last 20 changes of a legend. Changes that go back to more than 60 days are removed. This keeps the file size low and saves unnecessary defragmenting of the file.

If the index file is removed or destroyed, the informations about the legends contained in the backup file are lost and a new (empty) file will automatically be created when calling the functions Legend Backup or Legend Restore. Before this, particular legends can manually be extracted form the file:

• Search for a typical text in the legend (a class value or label) with any text editor.
• Save the text between the previous and the following ODB initial ("3/1" followed by a carriage return) in a text file with the extension AVL.
• This legend file can then normally be loaded and used in ArcView.