Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for cartographers, geographers and GIS professionals. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I've been trying to convert a map from .mxd to .kml for google earth. The map has municipalities labeled as well as train stations. When I save it and open it in Google Earth, only the train station labels appear.
I have tried moving the municipal layer up in the table of contents before saving. I have also tried taking out the rail stations labels and only having the municipal labels. Neither has done the trick.
Google Earth requires labelled polygons in ArcGIS to be labelled points.
*use the 'INSIDE' to force points inside the original polygon.
Use Feature to Point (Data Management) Toolbox http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//00170000003m000000
add the point layer into your .mxd label it.
Export to KML/KMZ
Personally, no matter what I do I have all sorts of rendering issues when converting annotations to KMZ. (it could be because I am trying to precisely place 100s of labels in a KMZ) To overcome these problems I convert annotations to polygons which is not an elegant solution but it does work flawlessly every time.
The underlying point to understand is that kml is a very different model than that of an ArcGIS (.mxd) map, and in general is more restrictive. As already noted by @mapperz, you can't label a polygon. But there are many other things you also can't do in kml which you'll discover along the way. If you're going to be generating a lot of kml from mxd files (or other sources), it would pay to look over the kml reference to understand the range of what can and can't be done.
