Angle Point Labels as Fitting Strategy

[BrianSullivan]

Make it so rotated point labels utilize the Offset, Best Position functionality.

Here, I'm labeling with Offset, Best Position:

There are 3 labels dropped, and I can't easily tell which label goes with which point.

Here I tried angling the labels by attribute (45 degrees), using Offset, Best Position.

Better, but they're all labeling to the Northeast, and dropping the label when they don't fit.  Seems like a bug.

If angled lables would use the Best Position functionality, they'd look like this:


So, that would be good.  But the best option yet would be to make rotating point labels a Fitting Strategy option (like what is offered for polygon labels):

[Anonymous User]

Yes, rotate label as a fitting strategy for points is really needed! I would use it all the time. Without it, I'm pretty limited as to how I can fit these labels in.

[RobertBorchert]

Not 100% sure what your asking but I think it exists.  Here is what I do.  I create 2 new fields called LabelRotation and LableAngle.  Both are short integer.

I create 3 lable rules for the point.  Label By Rotation, Label By Angle and Undefined.  SQL query for Lable Rotation looks like this
[LabelRotation] is not null and [LabelAngle] is null  AND [SeparateLabel] = 'N'
LabelAngle 
[LabelAngle] is not null
Undefined 
[LabelRotation] is null and [LabelAngle] is null 

With these three rules Undefined shows up if rotation and angle are null
Rotation overides undefined and shows up if rotation is not null and ange is null
Angle overides rotation is Angle is not null.

Then in Placement properties for Rotation select Rotate by Attribute 

This will place a label at the specified Angle all the time.  Then change the settings to Straight  and the rotation field to LabelAngle 

This does seem labor intensive but for stubborn areas such as you have here it will allow you to specify for each point exactly where you want it to go.

[AndrewWallick]

For those interested, there's also this post about rotating point labels to take into account other layers, such as having your point labels rotate dynamically to fit inside polygons.

An option for point labels to automatically rotate as needed 

[WendyHarrison]

You can do this with the Standard Label Engine using the Place label at specified angle option.

in the image below the labels tried to place at 45 and when they couldn't, they tried the rest of the list of angles until they placed.

We have an enhancement request to add this functionality to Maplex.  Please keep adding kudos to this so that we know people are interested.