Extensions > Maplex > Label fitting strategies
Abbreviating words to place more labels |
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Release 9.1
Last modified April 26, 2005 |
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The Maplex Label Engine can automatically shorten words to fit a given label with its feature if you specify the word and abbreviation in an abbreviation dictionary. When you use an abbreviation dictionary, the Maplex Label Engine will first attempt to place the full text of the label, then abbreviate any words found in the dictionary for labels that could not be placed.
Abbreviation dictionaries are applied to individual label classes. The abbreviation is applied to a freestanding word or groups of words, not parts of words, with the exception of certain nonEnglish words. Individual words, such as Road and Street, can be abbreviated as Rd or St, or longer strings, such as Post Office, can be abbreviated as PO. Portions of words will not be abbreviated. For example, if you had a dictionary entry mapping Road as Rd, the label Roadrunner Road would be abbreviated as Roadrunner Rd, not Rdrunner Rd.
To use abbreviations in labels, you must first create an abbreviation dictionary and add to it some words and their abbreviations. Once you’ve created a dictionary, you can save it as a file that you can load to use with other maps.
To add words to an abbreviation dictionary, you add a row to the dictionary table, type the word in the keyword column, type one or more abbreviations separated by spaces, and specify what type of dictionary entry it is. Multiple-word keywords and abbreviations and nonalphabetical characters must be contained within double quotation marks. For example, the two-word string “Post Office” might be abbreviated as “Post Off.” or “P.O.” The alternative abbreviations must be separated by a space.
There are three types of abbrieviation dictionary entries; keywords, endings, and translations. Two of these types, keywords and endings, are only applied to words when the original string can't be placed because of space, label-to-label, or label-to-feature conflicts. Translation entries are always applied to all matching words.
- Keywords—can be applied to all words in a string except the last word. You would use keywords to replace common words such as “Mount” or “International” with abbreviations such as “Mt.” and “Int’l.”
- Endings—can be applied to only the last word of a string. You would use this type of abbreviation to shorten street endings, such as, Street to St, Road to Rd, and Avenue to Ave, and so on.
- Translations—always applied to all words of a string. Translation entries may be useful when you translate a map into another language, when you want to remove words from a label string, or when you want all occurrences of a word to be abbreviated.
NonEnglish street names
In Germanic languages, the generic street ending is appended to the street name; for example, Fredrichstrasse. To deal with these special cases, the Maplex Label Engine can recognize four special character strings that can be abbreviated when they are found within a longer string. These four words are:
- strasse—German
- gatan—Swedish
- straat—Dutch
- gade—Danish
To abbreviate these words, you must still add them to the abbreviation dictionary. You can use any abbreviation for these special words, but you must set the abbreviation type to "Ending" for the abbreviation to be implemented. No other character strings will be abbreviated when they are contained within a string.
Saving abbreviation dictionary files
Abbreviation dictionaries can be used in other map documents by saving and loading them into the new map document. The files are formatted text files and are saved with the file extension .dic.
Lines that begin with the "*" character are comment lines. The format of an abbreviation entry follows:
<Word> <Option1> <Option2> <OptionN> <Type>
Example of an abbreviation file
* Maplex Extension Dictionary File - v1.0 * Format: TEXT ABBREVIATION(S) TYPE * where TYPE=[Translation|Keyword|Ending] Street Str St Ending Road Rd Ending 'Post Office' 'P.O.' PO Keyword * [end]