What is the Maplex Label Engine?

Well-placed labels can make a map more understandable and useful. The Maplex Label Engine provides a special set of tools that allows you to improve the quality of the labels on your map. With the Maplex Label Engine, you can define parameters to control the positioning and size of your labels; the Maplex Label Engine then uses these parameters to calculate the best placement for all the labels on your map. You can also assign different levels of importance to features to ensure that more important features are labeled before less important ones.

The Maplex Label Engine lets you control how labels should be placed relative to features, how labels can be modified or reduced to allow more label placement when the available space is constrained, and how conflicts between labels are resolved.

The Maplex Label Engine provides the following:

• Advanced placement styles for polygons including styles that represent land parcels, rivers, and boundaries
• Special placement for lines that represent street, river, and contour features
• Ability to offset labels from features
• Repetition of labels at a specified distance along a line and within a polygon
• Control of word and character spacing
• Alignment of labels to projection graticules
• Control of label placement zones
• Flexible placement to allow more labels to fit in an area
• Fine control of label stacking
• Label abbreviation and truncation
• Font reduction parameters for congested areas
• Control of whether a label may extend beyond a feature
• Enhanced weighting of features to determine label placement
• Control over the minimum feature size that will be labeled
• Placement of labels as background text
• Search tolerance to remove duplicate labels
• Ability to connect line features for labeling
• Key numbering
• Ability to control the order in which the label fitting strategies are applied