5 replies to this topic

[kms]

I'm having a problem creating annotation using both Maplex and the standard labeling engines. I'm trying to label parcels for ease of use by our Assessor's office, and I just can't get the darn things to create. Roughly half to three-quarters of the annotation just isn't there, and I'm not talking about unplaced annotation.

So, I've tried everything that ESRI suggests (no expressions in the label, run the engine in Layout View rather than Data View, etc.), and some things that I just came up with on my own. I was originally trying to create all 141,000 labels at once, so I broke it down into 20,000 parcel feature classes. This left one feature class with roughly 4500 parcels in it, and not even that one will annotate more than half the parcels.

Any suggestions?

[eli]

This is a pretty basic question, but do they have enough space to place themeselves? I wonder if you ticked on "place overlapping labels" and let it stack/change the size/whatever else it wants to do, if you would get some more annotation?

[wick]

Do you have very high feature weights assigned to any label classes? That can prevent labeling in some cases.

[lavalliere]

I ran into a similar problem a few years ago with 9.1 (8.3?), and with sections not labelling despite there being plenty of room in many places for my 5 pt label to be placed. It turned out that the label engine would only handle 50,000 (if my memory serves) labels total, including all other layers, including those that had been converted to annotation. The solution was to bring the PLSS layer into a new map document, and then label and convert to annotation by selecting x number of features; exit, create new map document and do the same for the next set of sections. It did work, finally. I haven't tried that much annotation with 9.3.1, so I'm not sure if the same label number limit holds.

[Jon Morris]

The only limit on the number of labels that Maplex can handle is the amount of memory available. This will depend on the physical amount of RAM and also the amount used by any other processes/applications running at the same time. The actual memory management is done by Windows but if you have 4GB of memory, everything should stay in RAM. If you have less, some paging will take place. In either case, your labels should still come out ok, it just might take a bit longer. Sometimes, if you try to label a very large area, Maplex does give an out of memory error, but in this case you will get no labels at all. As an example, the largest test map I run regularly contains 150,000 features which at the moment is placing 90,000 labels with 60,000 unplaced.

If you have tried changing all the labeling settings - try a smaller font size or allow a larger overrun for example - and still cannot get the labels to place you may have found a bug. If you report it to ESRI support with a sample of your data, we'll get to work on a fix.

[carto_apprentice]

Do you find that using Maplex even with it's limited ability to control placement of labels is a better option than adding graphic labels?