topic Re: Place Label at Specified Angles in Mapping Questions

Place Label at Specified Angles

NateBradshaw — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 18:29:52 GMT

In the old standard labeling engine the user has the option to "Place Label at specified Angles". In the new Maplex labeling engine this option is unavailable.

Maplex is unable to label from a list of specified angles.

Proposed Maplex Fix: In Labeling Position, User-defined zones, needs an option to align Straight or Horizontal.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

JonMorris — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:51:14 GMT

Just below User-defined zones is the option Rotate by attribute. If you select this, you can rotate your labels by a single value or an attribute (or no rotation at all) then you can choose Straight, Horizontal or Perpendicular alignment.

It's true that Maplex doesn't offer a list of angles, only one, but this should help you.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

SaraMoulton — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:31:36 GMT

Is there a way to make a polygon's label at a fixed angle?
I need to use Maplex for other features in the data frame, and would like to have the polygon's identifying label be at 45 degrees for one feature layer. Now sure how to do that.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

JonMorris — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:50:52 GMT

Unfortunately we don't have that capability at the moment. I'll add it to the list of future enhancements though.

Possible workarounds (not ideal, I know) include aligning labels to the graticule, rotating the dataframe and labelling horizontally, or generating points to use as label place markers.

Sorry, I can't offer any better solutions at the moment.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

KATHERINEHADLER — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:51:38 GMT

Has this functionality been added yet?

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

JonMorris — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:14:17 GMT

Sorry, Katherine, our development cycle is too long for us to have made any progress on this yet. When I said I would add it to the future enhancement list, back in September, new development had finished for 10.1 and we were entering the stabilisation phase. Hopefully we can look at it when we start development on the next release, although at this stage I've no idea when that will be released. Or even what number it will be!

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

JillPlescher — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:01:30 GMT

When labeling roads I want the labels to either be at 0 degree or 90 degree angles, almost all of the time.
It makes the label much clearer to read. Is there a way for Maplex to follow this rule? Most of the time the label are just a little off from this. It seems that someone may have been as frustrated as myself and written some code to make this happen?

This inquiry seems close to the previous thread, although I was not certain it is the exact same question.

Any ideas to get my labels straight will be appreciated.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

JonMorris — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:03:53 GMT

Hi Jill,

Are you labelling a regular grid of streets, or are they at angles in between 0° and 90°? Do you have a rotated dataframe? If your streets are mostly perpendicular, with an unrotated dataframe, straight labelling should work for you, but if some streets are at other angles, you will have to use a workaround. If you try and divide your features into two labels classes using SQL queries, you could set one label class to horizontal and the other could use Rotate by Attribute to add 90° to each label.

Sorry we don't have a better solution for you.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

CaseRobertson — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 21:02:22 GMT

A duck tape option is to turn your labels into annotation, then in the label properties there is an option to specify the angle.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

CraigSchaefer1 — Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:26:55 GMT

Has this functionality been added yet?

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

NateBradshaw — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:04:36 GMT

I dont want to define an angle for each point. I want it to determine, from a list, the best angle to apply.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

NateBradshaw — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:06:13 GMT

I dont think so.

Re: Place Label at Specified Angles

NateBradshaw — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:09:22 GMT

no, but like this thread to get it elevated.