Fix Labeling Limitations for Vector Tiles
A true cartographer (which I am not) will never allow software to determine label placement.
I partly agree, but to dismiss automatic labeling entirely, is not the way to go. In fact, Maplex labeling, through its settings, incorporates many of the "natural" and intuitive things cartographers would do to place labels. It is to a large extend build from a "cartographers" point-of-view.
The big thing though with using Maplex, is that you really need to spend time with it to fine-tune its settings and to learn how to use them effectively. That - to me - is in essence very much equivalent to "never allow software to determine label placement". You, as the cartographer, should be in charge of what Maplex does.
This is by no means an easy task, just like fully manually annotating a map isn't. One reward of Maplex is though, that once you set it up appropriately, you can repeat the labeling, and process maps from all over the globe using similar settings if an appropriate global dataset is available.
Here are just two examples of maps I created using OpenStreetMap data, and that heavily rely on Maplex (in fact, all labels were placed by Maplex). I spend a huge amount of time fine tuning the used labeling settings, and there are in fact hundreds of labelclasses at work here.
These maps are by no means perfect, and there are definitely things one might do differently when placing labels manually, but I do think the Maplex results are by no means to be dismissed.
It would nice to have a solution for the repeated labels issue - for the tiles to reflect the settings in ArcGIS Pro. Besides that, the vector tile creation process seems to work really well.
We would also love to transition our basemaps to vector tiles, but are running into these labeling limitations preventing us from giving an acceptable product to our end users. In our case, it seems like label weight settings from Pro are largely ignored when creating the tiles.
Here is a screenshot of our (traditionally) cached basemaps (decent automatic label placement)
And the same thing recreated as vector tiling (not nearly as good placement despite having identical labeling in Pro):
It seems Esri's own vector basemaps have noticeable label overlap as well, so I presume this isn't anything we're doing?
8 years later and it still seems like vector tiles still don't support labeling very well. I was looking for a solution for duplication of labels along streets and came across this post.
