I'd like to show you some options that are available for labeling your map. Okay. Here I've got a pretty simple map. I can't say I'm super thrilled with it, but it will serve our purposes. I just wanted to show you a map that's easy to use for labeling, and what I'd like to do is label each of these wards. So, these are the areas or jurisdictions for each city counselor, in the City of Toronto, and I want to label them with the name of each city counselor. So, if I go to wards and say, "open attribute table", and let's just dock that to the bottom here, so it's a little easier to see. You can see that we have data in our table about the name of each ward so Scarborough-Rouge River for example, and some other codes that are available, there's lots of data. You have to get used to seeing data and being able to skim through it quickly. We have the name of the counselor for the 2006 election for example, and then over here, on the far right, we can see the name of the counselor that's the current counselor since the last election in 2014. All right. So, that's the data in our attribute table that we want to actually use to generate the labels for our map. We could just insert a text box for each one of those wards, and manually type in the name of the counselor and place them manually. But that's really tedious and time-consuming, it doesn't really take advantage of the power of a GIS. Instead, what we can do, is right-click on wards, go to "properties", and hit the labels tab, and then tell the software to use the string that we want or sorry, the field that we want for our labeling. So, that happens to be the one named "counselor". That's the one we want to use here. We can then change the size of the label, the style of the label. For now, we'll just go with the default I've got it at calibri 10, and say, "okay". So, there's no labels on my map yet. No, all I've told is where the data are located for the labels. Now, actually, I have to tell it to do the labeling. So, if I go and right-click on wards, and say, "label features". So, there we go. I actually have labels on my map for each of the wards. You might be thinking that doesn't look that great, and you're right. I'd have to agree with you on that. So, yes we have accomplished our task, we have generated labels from the attribute table. But anytime you get the software to do something automatically, it almost never works out exactly the way you want, at least not the first time. So, let's look at how we might be able to tweak this a little bit, to improve our labeling in terms of the size and position and so on. If I go back and right-click on my feature class wards, and select "properties", and go back to the label tab. You'll notice that there's some options here at the bottom for things like "placement properties". So, we can, for example, tell the software whether it's important that all of our labels be horizontal, or if they have to always be straight, then you can say try horizontal. Then straight. Only place labels inside polygons, you can ask it to remove duplicate labels. You can tell it to look at conflicts between labels, and see if that's important to you or not. So, let's just say let's try some simple things to begin with, we'll try horizontal first and then straight. We'll try it so that it only places them inside the polygon, and we'll have one label per feature part and say, "okay". Let's see how that looks. No, that's not so good. So, what's happened here, is that, we've got things that are weird angles, so that's actually hard to read. When we tell it to only include labels inside polygons, if it can't fit it inside the polygon, then it doesn't include any label at all. So, this is far from ideal. So, there's some other things that we can work on to see if we can improve this a little more. What if we go back to our placement properties, and we'll say let's keep them as always horizontal. I think that looks best, and we'll loosen this up a bit and say that it doesn't have to be completely inside the polygon, and let's try for some smaller text. Let's try for eight and see how that looks. Okay, so at least it's a little easier to read. We can see that things like that look correct now, and the ones up here, we don't have them at weird angles. So, that's an improvement. But it's not great, in that, we have these overlaps here, with the label between one ward and another, so, that's not ideal. So, it makes it a little less legible, a little harder to read, and it's not the best. So, let's see if we can improve that a little bit more. Let's go back to our label properties and we'll select "symbol". Then if we say, "edit symbol", we get some options here that we can work with. So, for example, if we click the mask tab, we can create a halo around the text, and so what this will do, is create a halo, so that we've got a little bit of space, a little room around the text, and it'll mask the lines that are behind the text so that the text becomes a little more legible. If we just use the light though, if we have white on beige, it's going to look a little clunky, it's not the greatest. So, why don't we try to match the mask color for our text, to the background color, so that it's doing that effect of masking it for us, but in a more subtle way. I'll select the color that matches the background. Select okay, okay, okay, okay. So, as you see now, is that there is a halo there and you can see that we now have more legibility between the text and the background. In other words, let me just zoom in a little bit here. For example here, you can see that the text halo is now masking the area around it. So, you're just giving your texts a little more room to breathe if you want, makes it a little more legible. This is still not the most amazing labeling job in the world. But I've already, kind of, cleaned it up a bit, and after the least it's acceptable. There's another option available to us that's a little more advanced in terms of labeling. But I think you might want to know about it because it's got a lot more options, and it's a lot more flexible, and a lot more powerful. If we go to, "customize toolbars" and select the labeling toolbar, this comes up here. So, what we can do is select "Use Maplex Label Engine". This is like, I don't know, if you want to think of it like a labeling on steroids. It's like an extra option or feature that's available, that if we select that, we'll now have more options available in terms of what we can do with our labels. Okay. So, now, if I go back to right-clicking on wards, select "properties", and go to that labeling tab again, we select "placement properties", we now have more options available to us with the Maplex Labeling Engine, than we would have had with just the basic labeling engine or properties. So, for example, we can say, "may place label outside polygon boundary". We can say we can spread the wards if we want to, or spread characters, we're not going to do that here. In terms of fitting strategy, this might be really useful for us, is we can stack labels. So, we can actually have the label taken into two different levels. If we click on options like that, you can tell it how to do it based on things like a space, if there's a space in the name, you can use that to break up the text. So, it's got a split after the space there. You do the same thing with commas. We could add in one say for a hyphen if we want, and have the split afterwards and make that visible, and say "okay". We could reduce the font size for some if need be, or have it overrun. There's a lot of different options here. I'm not going to go through all of them but I just want you to see what can be done here. So, let's try this and see how it goes. Say "okay". Already we're seeing something much better. So, you'll notice for example, that if I zoom in here, it's breaking up the counselor names into two levels, so, one on top of the other. That of course is going to help a lot, in terms of making sure that most of them fit inside the polygons. We could change the size of the text, the color of the text that we're using. But generally speaking, this is something that you can work with. There's a lot of options in there, like I said, I won't go through every single one of them. But if you work with those depending on the size of the areas that you're trying to map, the size of the text you want to use for your labels. Usually, you can get something to work in a way that that's going to look pretty good overall. So, I would encourage you to try the basic Labeling Engine first. If that does what you need it to do, then that's fine. If it's a basic map, and it does the job, great. But if you want some more options, use that labeling toolbar, enable the Maplex Labeling Engine, and it will give you a lot more options in terms of things you can do with your labels.
