Set label width/word wrap when using text balloons

[BenColeman1]

Hi there,

I have not been able to find a way to specify maximum width of text balloons that are generated by labeling.  The work-around I'm currently implementing is converting the labels to annotation, then manually placing carriage returns in each balloon to approximate the ideal balloon width.  As you might imagine, this is very time consuming.

Thanks in advance for your help.

PS  I'm using the Maplex label engine in ArcMap 10.1

[MahtabAlam1]

You can try using label expression to break up the resulting text based on some character width. Following is an example script:

def FindLabel ( [myField] ):
  result = ""
  counter = 1
  for char in [myField]:
    result = result + char
    if ( counter % 5 == 0):
      result = result + '\n'
    counter = counter + 1
  return result

Please note line 6, in this snippet character width is 5.

HTH

[BenColeman1]

I see the reason you might do this, but doesn't it sometimes arbitrarily cut words across multiple lines?

[MahtabAlam1]

It's just an example and can be modified to make sure it doesn't split words. I would stick to label stacking as as a better approach unless I need complex text parsing.

[WendyHarrison]

Maplex has a stack labels option

About stacking labels—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

you can restrict the number of characters per line and also the number of lines.

Wendy

[BenColeman1]

This is what I needed.  I had it set to stack labels, but because my label expression contained five `VbCrLf`s, the label was exceeding the default maximum number of lines allowed (3) in every case.  I upped the maximum to 10 lines and that did the trick.