Editing made easier

Suppose you're moving a street centerline feature that connects to another street centerline feature at an intersection. No matter how carefully you use the editing tools, you will likely have difficulty making the features connect at precisely the right point. You may leave a tiny gap or an overlap between the features.

To make sure features connect properly with other features, you can use a method called snapping. Snapping moves ("snaps") your mouse pointer exactly to a vertex, edge, or endpoint of a feature when the mouse pointer comes within a certain distance, called the snapping tolerance. The part of the feature to which you can snap is called the snapping agent. You can designate the vertices, edges, or endpoints of any existing layer as snap agents, and you can turn snap agents on or off as needed.

In the example below, the yellow lines represent parcel boundaries and the red lines represent streets. A new segment is being added to the streets layer. Snapping has been turned on and the vertices of features in the streets layer have been specified as the snap agents. The green circle represents the snapping tolerance.

Mouse over the bullets below to see the effect of snapping using these settings.

Before	After
Yellow lines represent parcel boundaries; red lines represent streets. The green circle represents the snapping tolerance.	Because only the vertices of the streets layer have been set as snap agents, the mouse pointer doesn't snap to the vertices of features in the parcels layer even though they are within the snapping tolerance.