Automatic placement of text corresponding to graphical objects is animportant issue in several applications such as Geographical Data Systems (GIS),Cartography, and Graph Drawing. While usually only a finite number of possibleplacements is available, in this paper we allow for an infinite number of placementsand only require the label to be as close as possible to its corresponding feature.We focus on realistic data and present a hybrid algorithm for labeling both lineand point features. In the method’s first step that works on the discretized mapimage processing tools are used to obtain an initial placement of all labels in allowed(i.e., non overlapping) position. The second step works on the continuous map anduses a force-directed iterative algorithm to improve this initial placement. In acomprehensive study on realistic data sets we investigate the performance of ourmethod.
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