Gate label ambiguity across zoom levels

[vocux]

Hello! First of all thank you so much for this amazing program! I realize that in a recent version it was implemented that you can now see the full Gate Labels on the map (for example "Gate A 22"), which is really wonderful, I now don't need to hover over a gate in order to get the gate letter from the tooltip before selecting a gate in GSX. Thank you for that! 🥳

However if I may make a suggestion: I noticed that this label is represented differently depending on the zoom level. Sometimes a "G" is prepended as an abbreviation for the word "Gate". Like this:

Zoomed-out:

This "G" however is ambiguous in a way that it could also represent a G Gate (Golf Gate):

Zoomed-out:

So while now I don't need to hover over a gate to read the tooltip, I instead need to zoom in in order to determine if a gate I see is Gate 14 or Gate G14.

Could the labels be implemented in a similar way they are implemented for taxiways, so displaying either the full identifaction of the gate ("A10" for Gate A10 and "10" for Gate 10) or nothing at all; so no abbreviation of any kind? I do get the intent of trying to display as much info as possible on a given zoom level but in a current state this ambiguity outweighs the pros of the full gate labels a bit in my opinion.

Best wishes! 😊

[albar965]

This is a compromise I have to do when compressing gate numbers. Not doing this would terribly clutter up the airports.

Depending on name and zoom distance you will already see Gate A10 shortened to A10. I don't see the ambiguity as a big problem and I'm afraid there is not much room for improvement.

[vocux]

Thanks for your reply! 😊 I think there was a misunderstanding at some point, my problem isn't the compression of the gate labels overall, it's that the word Gate sometimes (but not always) gets compressed to G, as is Golf. So you can't tell if G10 means Gate 10 or Gate Golf 10.

I was just asking to keep the same compression behaviour but to just remove the compression of the word "Gate" to "G" entirely and only compress Gate 10 to 10 (and never G10) and only Gate Golf 10 to G10 (and never 10)

That would solve any ambiguity and clutter the airports even less! And it would keep it consistent with what you see in charts, where the abbreviation behaviour is as described.

[albar965]

There are hardly an Golf gates.

I also have to compress the gate and parking names of X-Plane which are partly really trash. Sorry, won't change.

[vocux]

There are hardly an Golf gates.

Huh? Just very quickly looking at the biggest airports, all of them have Golf Gates: Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna...

Compressing the word "Gate" to "G" is really contra-intuitive and clutters labels even more (which I thought was your argument) and no chart provider (I looked at Jeppesen, Lido and national ones) ever abbreviates gates like this and I think no chart provider ever would.

So I just think it would improve consistency throughout and even de-clutter the UI, but I rest my case now. You can close this.