In the attached image you can see that leader lines have 2 possible anchor points, the vertical centre of the left and right of the text bounding box. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the anchor point to be the horizontal centre of the top or bottom of the bounding box.
Try it yourself by dragging the end of a leader line in a circle around the text it will snap between the left and right only.
This makes for awkwardly placed leader lines in cramped conditions.
For example, if the text is directly above the item to which the leader line is pointing, it will have to go at an angle down from the vertical centre of the text across to a point below the horizontal centre, see next image.
In the above image you can see the results of my suggestion (a line I have had to draw in using the Draw toolbar) where the line has an anchor point at the horizontal centre of the top of the text bounding box.
Can ESRI add one at the top and the bottom to accompany the ones on the left and right?
Microsoft Word and Excel have something like this functionality when you insert a shape:
Their leader line version, however, is a line where you can adjust the position of the anchor and the destination point. This might be optimal for ArcMap too.
Thanks,
Wil
I agree that more control over the leader line "departure" location would be very helpful.
Yeah, we really need some attention to the details and some customization here. It seems there are more possible anchor points in Pro than ArcMap, but you still can't set which one your leader connects with and it often just looks confusing at best. In some cases, it doesn't even point your leader line at the label.
In addition to user overrides, it would be great if it could do a better job at whatever it's trying to auto-do here and in cases like this.
I agree with what rburke said on 6/5/23. It's clear that the leader line is automatically snapping to a point on the text bounding box (see below), but either the way the system decides which point the line snaps to needs to be improved or users should be able to specify which anchor point it goes to (I prefer the latter). In its current state, sometimes I would have to place the text in a weird location far away from the feature to get the line to point to the text in the way I want.
Wild that this idea has been "open" for over a decade!
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