Greetings fellow listers, For those of you that may be interested, below is a technique that I use to overcome overlapping labels... > Initially I had situation where I use a table of Place names daily. When > I labelled this layer, I would get a random set of places appearing each > time (depending on scale of the map etc.) > > Most of the time I would not get the major place names as these would be > overwritten by lesser place names. > > Instead of manually moving/rearranging and saving the labels each time, I > did the following.... > > 1) Added a Population column and a Weighting column to the source Places > table > > 2) Manually went through the table and added population and weighting > figures for each town in the table (time consuming initially) Population > stats were obtained from local Bureau of Statistics. Weighting values were > 1,2 & 3 representing Major, Main & Minor Place names respectively. (You > will have to decide your own population thresholds for the weighting > values) > > 3) Sort this table by population and save it. > > 4) Query the table from step 3 by each of the weighting values. Save each > of these queries as a new table. I called the 3 resulting tables Places1 representing the major towns, Places2 representing the main towns & Places3 representing the minor towns. > 5) Add these 3 new tables to your mapper and layer them in the following > order with respect to each other, Places1 - bottom, Places2 - middle & > Places3 - top. > > Now turn on the labels for each of these 3 tables and you will always get > the major places labelled before the main places and the main places label > before the minor places, no matter what zoom level or map scale, as > Mapinfo labels its layers from the bottom layer up. > > > Tips. > ------------- > If you want the labels for these layer to take precedence over labels for > other layers, make sure they are the top 3 layers. > > If a place represents a significant area or town but the population > doesn't show this, give it a lower weighting in step 2 above > (alternatively give it a dummy population) > > If you set the label values for each layer as follows this gives a good > effect when printing Layouts. > > Places1 (Major) Font size =9 (Bold) > Places2(Main) Font size = 7(Bold) > Places3(Minor) Font size=7(Non Bold) > > Step 2 can be quite time consuming initially, but pays off 100 fold once > setup as you will always get the labels you want without any (if only very > minor) rearranging and without having to save label layers each time. > I hope this is of some, its not the ultimate solution, > Regards > > Peter Doyle > TELSTRA > NTG > Global Connect > OnAir Networks Queensland > Geographical Information Systems & Mapping > ' +61 7 34064304 > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]