Avoiding loss of text (labels, legend, title, page numbers) when exporting many Map Series pages from ArcGIS Pro?

Question

This is the first page of an ArcGIS Pro layout, with Map Series enabled, that has been exported to PDF when choosing to do just pages 1-10:

This is the first page of the same ArcGIS Pro layout, with Map Series enabled, that has been exported to PDF when choosing to do all 255 pages:

As you can see, no text is coming through in the labels, legend, static title, or dynamic page numbers, and the same loss of text is seen when I export pages 1-100.

I am using ArcGIS Pro 1.2, on Windows 7 SP1, 64bit, with 8Gb RAM. The data being used is from Natural Earth 1:10M Cultural Vectors: Admin 0 – Countries and Admin 1 – States, Provinces.

It seems like the Map Series export is unable to handle this modest amount of text, for more than a very modest number of pages. Has anyone encountered, and then been able to avoid losing text in similar circumstances?

Both layers added from these shapefiles have Page Queries in place to label only the province names from the current country, and to label all countries except the current country, but I do not suspect these to be the cause of the symptoms that I am observing. When I removed these two page queries as a test the problem persisted.

One thing I am suspicious of is that I am currently running with only 1-2Gb disk space spare, so I will try freeing up some more to see if that has any effect.

The same project (which has nothing more in it than what is needed to do the above task) has given three Serious Application Errors that also seem to be related to exporting its layout. I plan to recreate the project from scratch to see if that too has the "text dropping problem" and whether it gets any Serious Application Errors.

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I now have more than 4Gb of free disk space and I have repeated the steps to recreate an identical project from scratch. No further Serious Application Errors have been experienced. I exported the layout to PDF a number of times. The text stayed for the first few of 255 map pages (the only ones I checked) as I added more complexity to the map (labelling countries, dynamic title, legend, dynamic page numbers) but when I added a second layer for states and provinces, and labelled that, the exported PDF was missing the text on the first three pages BUT appears to have it on the remaining 252 pages! I did not use any page queries in this test.

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I've now reproduced this using far less steps and complexity than in my original test case:

1. Download ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp and ne_10m_admin_1_states_provinces.shp from Natural Earth
2. Create a new Blank project
3. INSERT a New Basemap
4. In Project pane Add Folder Connection to the Natural Earth data
5. Drag and drop ne_10m_admin_0_countries.shp into the Basemap
6. Label the layer using default NAME field
7. Use FEATURE LAYER | LABELING to access Layer Placement group and Label Class pane where Conflict Resolution tab can be used to Remove duplicate labels > Remove all
8. Drag and drop ne_10m_admin_1_states_provinces.shp into the Basemap
9. Label the layer using default name field
10. Use FEATURE LAYER | LABELING to access Layer Placement group and Label Class pane where Conflict Resolution tab can be used to Remove duplicate labels > Remove all
11. INSERT a New Layout - I used ISO - Portrait > A3
12. INSERT a Map Frame for the Basemap
13. Use LAYOUT > Map Series to enable a Spatial map series for the Basemap Map Frame, using layer ne_10m_admin_0_countries, and field NAME for both the Name and Sort fields
14. Use SHARE > Export Layout and do all 255 pages

When I examine the output PDF there are no labels on the first three pages, but they appear to be on the remaining 252 pages.

Answer 1

I was playing with Map Series export just last week working at the Esri Showcase at DevSummit - so I'm suspecting something specific to your page def queries.

You could try removing the page query and letting all the labeling come through.

Answer 2

Thank you for making the data available, it made a difference. We were able to reproduce the issue and have submitted a bug # to be addressed as soon as possible. Here is the tracking number: BUG-000094979

In our testing, when we export pages 1-5, only pages 3-4 show the text. If we export just page 1, it works. If we turn off the labels for States/Provinces, it also works, even for many pages.

We will continue to evaluate this project.

Answer 3

I am not sure whether this was already fixed in ArcGIS Pro 1.3 but I just got around to re-testing it at ArcGIS Pro 1.4 and can confirm that it is now working fine there for all 255 pages.