Map annotations

MAP ANNOTATION

Annotation is a note added to comment or explain. In case of maps, it would be hard to understand the information conveyed by them without proper annotations. 

Annotation stored in the map document is referred to as map document annotation or graphic annotation or map annotation.

There are two types of map document annotation.

-Data frame annotation and

-Page text or graphic text

Data frame annotation is stored in annotation groups

• Text is stored in annotation groups which is a part of data frame
• Each piece of text stores its own symbol. If there are too many pieces of text in the map, the files become very large and give poor performance. In this case, geodatabase is a good alternative.
• Each annotation group has its own reference scale which together with its symbol size determines the size of text. The annotation group reference scales are editable
• Data frame annotation is never feature-linked. Only geo-database annotation can be feature-linked

Page annotation

Page annotation is the same as data frame annotation except for the following points:

• Text is stored in page space instead of geographic space (page coordinates are used instead of geographic coordinates).
• Page annotation is visible only in the 'layout' view
• Newly placed text is placed on the page when in 'layout' view and no data frame has focus.