An overview of the Annotation toolset

The Annotation toolset contains a collection of tools that allow you to automate your annotation workflow.

The Contour Annotation tool is used to create annotation for contour features. The tool generates annotation features and corresponding mask polygons. Masking out the contours beneath the annotation can help make the text more legible.

The Map Server Cache Tiling Scheme To Polygons and Tiled Labels To Annotation tools can be used together to convert a large number of labels to annotation. This can be useful for converting labels to annotation for a map that will be published as a map service or for any map that contains a large number of labels.

The Tiled Labels To Annotation tool is used to create annotation based on polygons specifying the extent and scale. These extents can be existing tiles, Data Driven Pages map sheets or new polygons generated from the Map Server Cache Tiling Scheme To Polygons tool. The Map Server Cache Tiling Scheme To Polygons tool uses a map cache tiling scheme to create a polygon feature class at the scale levels defined in the tiling scheme. The output from that tool can be used as input into the Tiled Labels To Annotation tool.

Tool	Description
Contour Annotation	Creates annotation for contour features.
Map Server Cache Tiling Scheme To Polygons	Creates a new polygon feature class from an existing tiling scheme.
Tiled Labels To Annotation	Converts labels to annotation for layers in a map document based on a polygon index layer.

Annotation toolset