Clearer text labelling - suggestions?

[andyeder]

Hi all,

I am looking for some advice and/or suggestions as to how I might be able to export clearer text labels when exporting rasterised maps. A bit of background information...

The contract I'm currently working on must adhere to certain standards and one of those standards states that text labels must be black (RGB(0,0,0)). However, these obviously do not show up well when overlaid against a dark background. Has anyone found a way to 'outline' text or produce a white halo around text items?

This is quite a problem as I'm working on a very large map with several thousand place names (the place names imported from a point Shapefile with the place names appearing as a known attribute/value pair at a given location). The exported maps are huge thus manual hand-editing of labels is not an option.

Thanks for your time.

[global_mapper]

What you can do is edit the font for the features and select the 'Label Background Fill Option' to 'Fill with Background Color', which will draw a box around the text filled with the current view background color. So if you set that background color to white the black text should always be visible.

We are hoping to add a better 'Halo Text' option in the upcoming v12 release of Global Mapper.

Thanks,

Mike
Global Mapper Support
support@globalmapper.com

[andyeder]

What you can do is edit the font for the features and select the 'Label Background Fill Option' to 'Fill with Background Color', which will draw a box around the text filled with the current view background color. So if you set that background color to white the black text should always be visible.

We are hoping to add a better 'Halo Text' option in the upcoming v12 release of Global Mapper.

Hi Mike,

Many thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, the box fill can obscure some of the finer detail where text is located on (or near to) features on the underlying map. Personally I would be happy with the box fill behind the text but the customer is not... *sigh* However, there are places where the method you describe would be ideal so many thanks for that.

I look forward to seeing the text 'halo' feature in a future build; this would be an extremely useful addition to Global Mapper.

Regards,
Andy