ArcGIS 9.2 demo at NACIS

Update: ArcNews now has an article on all this by Paul Hardy online.

Original article (Oct. 14, 2005):
Reps from ESRI gave a demo of the new ArcGIS 9.2 cartography capabilities at NACIS. Apparently 9.2 will go beta this December and be in release in 2nd quarter 2006. The cartography design aspects are implemented in what they are currently calling "Representation."

To use, you "convert to representation" and start editing. An Illustrator-like task bar comes up which allow you to edit objects on the map. ESRI emphasized these as personal overrides though, and that you would normally set up rules or sets of attributes for feature classes. This will be core functionality not an extension. So these rules will initiate two extra columns in the geodatabase ("rule" and "overrides").

Representation will also be part of ArcToolbox.

Update: ESRI Q+A at another session with Paul Hardy (phardy@esri.com) and an ESRI person in the audience mentioned the issue of "dicing." Apparently if you export to Illustrator there is a 2,000 node limit, but this can be fixed via an undocumented registry hack. The fix for this and other issues will NOT be in 9.2.