Place label leaders under the feature

[AlfredBaldenweck]

Is there a a way to make it so the leaders on a label created with either engine start from underneath the geometry?

This keeps happening and it looks bad, so I'd like to avoid it .

Thanks!

[RobertBorchert]

Pretty much my number one gripe about labels.  They probably don't do it because the leader would be visible under the label and would require the label to be masked.

But you would think with Pro that you could set up attribute fields to say yes it has a leader or no and then yes it has a halo or no etc.

[AlfredBaldenweck]

I would be fine if we could just set it to touch the outside of the feature, rather than the center. In some cases, though, the leader literally covers the entire symbol which means that I have to do a lot of tweaking. I suppose the "easy" thing to do is convert to annotations or map text(?) but I'm really trying to just have the labelling engine do most of the work.

[RobertBorchert]

Not a big fan of annotation myself, really only good in a narrow range of scale. 

It has been made as a suggestion a number of times. 

I did create label points once and then drew in a label leader.  The beginning of the leader was white.  I would do that for the difficult locations. 

[AlfredBaldenweck]

That's a good idea, thank you for suggesting it.

[RobertBorchert]

I should also note, I did that in ArcMap and they participated in a Geometric Network.  I could then just grab the label point and the leader would move with it. That particular GIS database was only used to generate PDF and Paper Map books so I was able to do it all at the same scale.

Another option for it was to create a point for each meter.  Then using a domain to make it visible or not visible. I then offset it by 5 feet and used the XY to line tool to generate leaders. Rebuilt the geometric network. Each leader was the same length give or take an inch.  I used a definition query to keep the label off if the length was less then 6. So If I moved the point out a foot it would turn on. The nice thing about using the label points was every label would stay were it was.  

Fortunately I no longer do that. 

[AlfredBaldenweck]

I found a working solution, but it's not as good as automatic.

Leader Line Feature Offset - Esri Community

If you all haven't voted for that idea yet, please do.