7 replies to this topic

[tmccann]

I know this is messy - there's a lot of stuff to clean up. But I'd appreciate any thoughts from anyone on how to make it look a little better.

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[Hans van der Maarel]

I know this is messy - there's a lot of stuff to clean up. But I'd appreciate any thoughts from anyone on how to make it look a little better.

The thing that pops out right away is the text placement. It seems to be all over the place. Did you have the text placed automatically? There's a lot of conflicts and those need to be fixed. Also, if you're not labelling a city because it's obscured by the label for another city, remove the symbol as well. Manama, Shiraz, As Samawah, there's a few more.

You can easily go a bit smaller for the city labels, this gives you a lot more room to play with. I personally prefer to curve labels for larger areas (Persian Gulf for example), so give that a try.

And finally, it's the Strait, not Straight, of Hormuz...

[tmccann]

I know this is messy - there's a lot of stuff to clean up. But I'd appreciate any thoughts from anyone on how to make it look a little better.

The thing that pops out right away is the text placement. It seems to be all over the place. Did you have the text placed automatically? There's a lot of conflicts and those need to be fixed. Also, if you're not labelling a city because it's obscured by the label for another city, remove the symbol as well. Manama, Shiraz, As Samawah, there's a few more.

You can easily go a bit smaller for the city labels, this gives you a lot more room to play with. I personally prefer to curve labels for larger areas (Persian Gulf for example), so give that a try.

And finally, it's the Strait, not Straight, of Hormuz...

Thanks for the thoughts. Good ideas, all.

Yes, I did use automatic placement for the labels, but then I tried to move them around some of them that were obvious problems. I need to do more work on that.

And, yes, the city names are too big.

And thanks for the catch on Strait - I'vre been navigating for 40 years and somehow spelled it wrong. Old age...

[Justin]

I know this is messy - there's a lot of stuff to clean up. But I'd appreciate any thoughts from anyone on how to make it look a little better.

Consider a serifed font for water labels to more easily distinguish them from the others!

[Kathi]

I agree, you could shrink the font sizes, which would give you more room and a much less crowded look. You might also think about capitalizing the country labels, but using a thinner version (regular, not bold). Also make sure no labels are cut off at the edges, and no lables exist whose features are cut off.

This may be a personal thing, but I prefer the labels on graticules to be as short as possible. "30°" would suffice, no need for minutes and seconds, nor N or E.

I'm also a fan of thin scale bars with equal parts, none of this "mark-divisions-and-first-midpoint" things ArcView does by default. But I guess that's personal again...

I'm not too familiar with the area, so a little legend would help: red stars are capitals, but what's the difference between black stars and green dots? And what do the drill towers represent?

And a last thing: In your index map the marine boundaries of several states are marked in dark blue, which stands out way too much in my opinion. Get rid of those. (When looking at the index, I'm interested to see where the main map is located, I'm not interested in the exact location of the greek-turkish border in the Aegaean Sea (not sure if that's spelled correctly...))

I hope this doesn't sound like nagging, because it's not meant like that.

[Dennis McClendon]

I don't understand the strange tilted and skewed labels, and certainly not the ones that appear to be casting shadows, but in a different direction from your shaded relief.

You can get away with Plate-Carrée for your main map, but it looks like a rookie mistake in your inset covering much of Africa and Eurasia.

[tmccann]

I don't understand the strange tilted and skewed labels, and certainly not the ones that appear to be casting shadows, but in a different direction from your shaded relief.

You can get away with Plate-Carrée for your main map, but it looks like a rookie mistake in your inset covering much of Africa and Eurasia.

Do you mean I should project the index map? Easy enough to do... I guess I should have used UTM or something on the main map, but it seems like overkill for that small an area.

[tmccann]

I hope this doesn't sound like nagging, because it's not meant like that.
[/quote]

It doesn't sound like nagging at all. Thanks for your thoughts.

I've cleaned up the labels a lot, but I like your other thoughts. A new rev is coming tomorrow.