Mapping Center

Whether you’re labeling soils, buildings, geologic units, lakes, or parks; you’ll eventually be faced with the problem of the text for the label being larger than the polygon you’re labeling. In most cases we recommend offsetting the labels from the small polygons and using leader lines to positively associate the label with its feature. The general idea is to split up the labeling of a layer into at least two label classes, one for the normal case, and one for the small features. Read More...

We got one of those perennial 'tough nut' questions on Ask a Cartographer today. The question had to do with annotation versus Maplex and what are often called overflow labels, which I have also heard called "key lists". While we are able to recommend tips and tools for specific circumstances or implementations, the person asking was more interested in what is the best strategy and why. So here's their question:

"We produce a 1"=1000' City map book from our GIS, similar to the Thomas Bros. street guides. Read More...

Notice in the first graphic below that the labels for "CAJON ST" and "CLIFTON CT" are placed over of major streets in a way that makes them difficult to read. This graphic is derived from my recent blog entry on the Maplex Street Placement option, and I was using the Street Placement option, but that left me with this problem. Well, this happened because I didn't tell the Maplex Label Engine to treat the major streets differently. Read More...

You may already have the Maplex for ArcGIS Extension. It's free with an ArcInfo license of ArcGIS. Many ArcInfo users don't know this and that fact has unfortunately kept many people from taking advantage of the superior text placement capabilities in the Maplex Label Engine.

One of those capabilities is the Street Placement option, which is available in the user interface for line layers. Though it is obviously for street labeling, we are often asked what exactly does it do?. Here's the answer Read More...

We've had a number of folks writing in on Ask a Cartographer wondering how to displace or offset coincident points so all the points could be seen. Data with coincident points is most commonly produced as a result of geocoding addresses. There are at least two ways to handle displaying this data.  One would be to create a graduated or proportional symbol thematic map, and to do that the input point data would be processed with the Collect Events tool, which would produce output containing points that represented the locations and an attribute that indicated how many points were at that location. Read More...