Labeling the center of a group of similar polygons

Question

I am working with some cadastral data and within city and towns there are the familiar lot, block, plans.

Where there is a "block", I can label the lots, parcel number and so forth for each individual polygon, but what I am having trouble with is label the block number for the lots that belong to the Block.  I can actually label the block using maplex and set limits and placement properties for the most part, but what I am not seeing or able to do "visually appealing" is to have the block number placed in the middle of the lots.

I dont have any special extension that city planners would use and I really dont want to dissolve the polys for each and every block as I have a very large number of urban areas to work with.

Any thoughts?

RobertBorchert · Answer

Sadly your best bet may be to dissolve all the polygons based on plat name and block (in a copy of course) then create annotation based on new polygons.  then you can get rid of the dissolved polys and keep the annotation.

What I did was create a new point feature I simply call Lot label and use it to create labels for blocks and plat names.

You can set it to remove duplicates but it would cause to many errors in that the plat next to it might have the same Block number  and it would only show one of the two.

I would be willing to bet there is a script that can be built as an expression for the label field to match up plat name and block number and only show the block one time.  However it is still going to associate it with one polygon.

Hence you may be best off going through the trouble of making annotation.  At least with the anno the text was not move around. I am working with some cadastral data and within city and towns there are the familiar lot, block, plans.

Where there is a "block", I can label the lots, parcel number and so forth for each individual polygon, but what I am having trouble with is label the block number for the lots that belong to the Block.  I can actually label the block using maplex and set limits and placement properties for the most part, but what I am not seeing or able to do "visually appealing" is to have the block number placed in the middle of the lots.

I dont have any special extension that city planners would use and I really dont want to dissolve the polys for each and every block as I have a very large number of urban areas to work with.

Any thoughts?