Tip 10: ESRI Symbols Fonts

Recently someone asked me how to use ESRI well symbols for bullets in MS Word documents and MS PowerPoint Presentations. Initially my first thought was to make a screen grab of the well symbol using Paint or Snagit, a useful utility software. This would provide a small image of the symbol that would be ideal. But surely there must be a more elegant way of using the symbol?

Yes there is – the ESRI Well Symbols are “Marker Symbols” which means they are stored as a character set in the same way as a font set such as ‘Arial’, ‘Times Roman’ or ‘Wingdings’.

In ArcMap the name of the symbol set can be found by using the Styles Manager – ‘Tools > Styles > Style Manager…’.  Next, click on the Styles button and select the ‘Petroleum’ or ‘Petroleum UK’ style. To display the individual well symbols expand the ‘Petroleum.style’ and click on the ‘Marker Symbols’ folder.

Let's assume that my required symbol is “Oil and gas well”. If I scroll to this entry in the list and double click it the ‘Symbol Property Editor’ dialog opens. From the dialog I can see that the font for this symbol is called ‘ESRI Oil, Gas, & Water’, and its 'Unicode' value. This information will allow me to add the character into other applications, the same way as, say, a Wingding Smiley Face symbol in a MS Word document.

To add my symbol into MS Word I can simply insert it by navigating to the menu option ‘Insert > Symbol’. Then I select the ‘ESRI Oil, Gas, & Water’ font and the required symbol in the ‘Symbol’ dialog. Note that if I can't see the symbol in the list I can simply type the number seen in the 'Unicode' earlier into the 'ASCII (decimal)' character code field.

 
When I clck 'Insert' the ESRI well symbol is inserted into the MS Word document at my current cursor position, as a nice sharp symbol.

With the symbol now added in MS Word it can be used o create custom bullets in the document. By selecting ‘Format > Bullets and Numbering…’ and then clicking on the ‘Customize’ button in the ‘Bullets and Numbering’ dialog. This opens the ‘Customize Bullet List’ dialog where the ‘ESRI Oil, Gas, & Water’ font can be selected from the ‘Font…’ button and the symbol can be selected from the ‘Character…’ button.

Now I have a nifty well symbol as a custom bullet both in MS Word and MS PowerPoint for my presentation instead of the usual black dots!  Note that in MS PowerPoint the steps are pretty much the same except for selecting ‘Format > Bullets and Numbering…’ from the menu and then clicking on the ‘Customise’ button in the ‘Bullets and Numbering’ dialog.  

 

Posted by Gavin Adcock, Consultant, Exprodat.

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