Select which segment to be labeled

[OscarMonell]

Hi!

I'm creating a road map, where the road feature class have multiple segments.
When creating labels for road names, multiple instances need to be removed.
Naturally I use "Remove dublicates within x map units". This works fine in most
cases.

But sometimes the chosen feature part isn't the most appropriate to label - is there a manual way to select
which segment to (and not to) label?

[SamuelTroth]

Hello,

The only way to achieve placement on a specific segment would be to convert the labels to annotation and manually move them to wherever you want them placed. If you create feature-linked annotation (available with ArcEditor license and above) you can enable the follow feature mode, which enables better manual editing of the annotation.

Sam
Esri

[DanaNolan]

You can also experiment with minimum mapping units (lengths), placing the labels at different offsets
from the beginning of the line to keep short segments from being labeled (also looks a bit better than labeling anywhere that fits). Offsetting the label from the road a bit may keep crooked streets from labeling "crookedly" or at all. I would also exclude ramps and unnamed streets and such from labeling, if you have fields that could help you do that.

In general, it is a lot easier to spend the time getting 90% of the labels you want by tweaking Maplex once, then adding the few most important ones than it is to get into adding, deleting, and moving annotation. You can always force the most important segments to label by putting them in their own labeling class with a high priority and buffer.

[OscarMonell]

Thank you for your suggestions!

I'll go with the 90% Maplex solution - will most likely be the best way
to do the job under the given possibilities.