If you're like me and you often have to digitize landuse areas and have to overlay them on an orthoimage, then this guide might help you with a common issue in ArcGIS. When you edit a polygonal layer and manually digitize a land use (with heads up digitization), you usually want to make it transparent so you can see the airphoto/satellite image underneath it. The problem with ArcGIS 9.2 (and 9.0, 9.1) is when you generate a legend, the legend items do not show the same transparency.
So, for instance, if you use red to indicated a black parking lot in ArcGIS, then give the red shapefile 50% transparency. The actual, on screen, colour is kind of a very dark red. However, in the Legend you see bright red, as if there was no transparency.
To fix this, here is the solution:
1) Make sure you have the transparencies and colors as you want them, this ArcGIS procedure is semi-permanent (ie. time consuming and difficult to undo).
2) First, you make sure the eye dropper tool is enabled and on a toolbar (go to customize> commands > page layout to add it to a tool menu).
3) Use the eye dropper to select the color in the ArcMap viewport that you wish to change the legend item to. It will save it to your colour palette as a standard ArcGIS color (but only for the .mxd document you are working on). Do the same for all the layers you wish to correct the color for.
4) Now you have the colour information stored for each of the transparent layers you wish to update in the legend. Click on the legend, right click and select "Convert to Graphics". This will break the legend into individual editable units
5) Select the Box of color that you wish to correct to the transparent color.
6) Use the bucket fill tool - found in the drawing menu - to change the colour of each box to their respective corrected transparent colors.
7) At this point, each legend item should be corrected and we have succesfully worked around this annoying ArcGIS issue.
