Fortunately, this turned out to be a recently modernized one, so it did have personal in-flight entertainment screens (since I can’t sleep on planes, I dread the idea of a long flight without some sort of entertainment). So imagine my shock when I saw an old MD-11 at the gate. KLM offers a direct flight on this route, so they are the most obvious choice for me, especially since they tend to use modern Airbus 330’s for their long-haul North America routes. Last Sunday I flew from Vancouver to Amsterdam, on my way home after the FME User Conference. Of course the rules you have to set are very much influenced by the local topography and what I’ve done here may not apply to your maps. Also, since the label text is taken directly from the attributes, there’s less chance of typos or other mistakes (assuming the source data is good of course).
#MAPUBLISHER AUTO GENERATE HIGHWAY SHIELD MANUAL#
Even with the manual editing that’s necessary to make this map look finished, it’s still saving me a lot of time. I think it’s important to keep in mind that LabelPro is a tool, not a magic box that’ll deliver perfect cartographic text placement. In retrospect, I think I might even want to limit it to dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs. Reducing the number of roads where leader lines are a valid option makes for a much clearer result. I did change the color for the streets for legibility. As you can see, there still is a need for some manual editing, but the overall image is a lot less cluttered than the first run.
![mapublisher auto generate highway shield mapublisher auto generate highway shield](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ist-app-support-files/000021628/00N39000003LL2C-0EMf2000000rYGx.png)
The main LabelPro interface, where I’ve specified the priorities and fonts to be used, looks like this:įinally, the result that we’ve all been waiting for.
![mapublisher auto generate highway shield mapublisher auto generate highway shield](https://cdn10.bigcommerce.com/s-528o7bvh/products/261/images/908/Rt66Camero__80596.1553574828.386.513.jpg)
The rulesets I created for these layers are as follows: I’ve set the treshold for short roads at 400 feet. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of leader lines cluttering up the map.
![mapublisher auto generate highway shield mapublisher auto generate highway shield](https://www.avenza.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/labelpro-results.png)
Again a condensed font, but it’s even smaller than the regular streets and now leader lines are allowed. Short streets – Selecting on the Length attribute that MAPublisher automatically generates allows me to seperate the short streets from the regular ones and set them up with a different set of rules.Unfortunately you can not instruct LabelPro to try and mix both versions of a font.
#MAPUBLISHER AUTO GENERATE HIGHWAY SHIELD PLUS#
Regular streets – No leader lines either, plus I’m going with a condensed font rather than the regular roman version.This one gets labelled with a higher initial font size and no leader lines. So again it’s manual selection and putting them on a new layer. I want to make sure they’re labelled the clearest, with the highest priority. Major roads – There’s several major roads present.So I manually select the interstate and its on- and offramps and put them on a new layer. Note that I can do this with LabelPro as well, but since there’s only one, it would take more time to set up the rules for it than it would to manually place 2 or 3 shields. I simply don’t label this one at all, instead I will be manually placing an interstate shield later on. Its segments have a road name, which basically is the interstate number. Interstate – There’s one interstate running through this area.These categories are then each set up with a different set of rules, so that I can more accurately influence the way they’re being labelled. I decided to split my data into 4 different categories. a “one set of rules fits all” approach clearly wasn’t going to work. It quickly became obvious that if I’d want the best results out of LabelPro, I would have to prepare my data. I have not shown the unplaced labels in this particular sample (for the sake of the argument that I’m trying to make, they don’t really matter that much anyway). When I examined the results of this first run, I noticed that it seemed to be very “leader line happy”. Using 9 pt Helvetica Neue, 55 Roman, as font. I loaded up the road centerline data, which was not classified by type, and set up some rules for this. This was my first real project using LabelPro so this would be a good test case.
![mapublisher auto generate highway shield mapublisher auto generate highway shield](https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/c9daa1b1-f32c-4e9f-9f6f-e6316a8fa082_1.d617943699e830a197b45ff21bafecc2.jpeg)
My task was to label street centerlines, using MAPublisher and LabelPro. Recently I got to work, as a subcontractor, on a street map for a US educational institution.