Chapter 3. Automating the Production of Map Books with Data Driven Pages and ArcPy

Many organizations have a need to create map books that contain a series of individual maps that cover a larger geographic area. These map books contain a series of maps and some optional additional pages, including title pages, an overview map, and some other ancillary information, including reports and tables. For example, a utility company might want to generate a map book detailing their assets across a service area. A map book for this utility company could include a series of maps, each of a large scale, along with a title page and an overview map. These resources would then be joined in a single document that could be printed or distributed as a PDF file.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The preparation of a map document to handle Data Driven Pages
• Using the data-driven pages toolbar in ArcGIS Desktop
• Using the DataDrivenPages object in the ArcPy mapping module
• Exporting map...