dymo labels need help

[almccon]

Because the labels files we are using were generated for Helvetica, not the narrower font we want to use for Terrain, the alignment of city labels looks bad.

By default, the labels are centered within the label polygon, and are usually way too far from the city dots.

If I try to text-align using the justified field in the data, like so...

  [justified='left'] {
    text-horizontal-alignment: left;
    text-dx: 15;
  }

  [justified='right'] {
    text-horizontal-alignment: right;
    text-dx: -15;
  }

...I can never get things to line up correctly.

(these examples include the following debugging code, to see the text polygon in the background)

  ::outline {
    polygon-fill: #fff;
    polygon-opacity: 0.3;
  }

[almccon]

Specifically: The original Terrain style used Dymo to carefully position all the city labels at low zooms, taking font size into account. The result of the Dymo placement can be found here: https://github.com/Citytracking/Terrain/tree/master/mapnik/cities Unfortunately these only cover North America, so they aren’t really useful for a worldwide Terrain layer. So far I tried borrowing the Dymo labels from Toner (https://github.com/stamen/toner-carto/tree/master/shp/labels_admin) but these were designed for Helvetica, not PT Sans, which Terrain uses. Need to find another approach.

[almccon]

Probably we should just give up on Dymo and see how well the default Mapnik label placement does the job.

[clhenrick]

@almccon would it be worth trying to re-run Dymo with the new font we are using?

[clhenrick]

@almccon also perhaps PostGIS could help, Mapbox has a post about this in their advanced label placement guide

[almccon]

Good idea. Since @mojodna would like us to migrate all the shapefiles into PostGIS anyway, we have the opportunity to do whatever processing we want in the database import step.

[clhenrick]

@almccon going to close this one as we agreed to resolve using data from aries and Mapnik label placement. Will open a new ticket to add place labels with the new data.