A pratical method for line labeling

A significant visualization problem in automated cartography and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is the map-labeling problem, which consists of placing text labels adjacent to geographic features in order to convey their meaning. In this paper, we propose one practical method for labeling line features using discrete model. A text label is treated as a sequence of axis-parallel squares considering the characteristic of Chinese character. The presented method firstly produces a candidate curve and then computes all the candidate positions. Then select labeling positions taking some esthetics criteria into account. This approach fulfills two requirements that no two labels overlap and that the label is placed alongside the corresponding curve. Experimental results illustrate that the new proposed algorithm is effective, implementation-friendly and efficient.