Tutorial Cartography for Map Figures in Academic Journals & Books

3. Hands On

3.7. Labels

Labeling options are also available in the Layer Styling panel.

1. Click on the

icon on the strip of icons on the left side of the panel.

2. For each layer, you'll need to choose a type of label - we'll just need Single Labels for this map, but feel free to explore the other options.

Once this option is set, you'll see lots of tabs across the upper part of the panel. Each tab has many options to explore.

I like to pick a single font to work with for the whole map. I will use Calibri here and show you ways to vary this single font to meet our needs. Note that my default font is some system font, so I'll need to change that for each layer. You can use whatever you like. The reason I'm using Calibri is that (1) you are likely to have it as well, (2) it's sans serif (it has simple lines and no flourishes... compare it with Times New Roman which is a serif font), and (3) it has many variants - regular, bold, bold italic, italic, light, light italic - so it's like have 6 fonts that all go together.

Another choice I'll make up front is that I will use 8 point font unless I need something bigger (probably the point labels will be larger).

3. For each layer, go to the text tab and set the Font to Calibri, 8 points.

States

Now we're going to focus on the US_CAN_Admin1 layer. The label text should be in capitals.

4. In the text

tab change the Font Color to the same as the ocean and state stroke (#cbcbcb).

5. Go to the Formatting

tab and change the Type case to All Uppercase.

6. Set the Spacing for letter to 1.5. This spaces out the letters, a design choice that is fairly common with labeling large polygons.

7. Now go to the Rendering tab and check the box for Show all labels for this layer (including colliding labels).

Lakes

We'll used rule-based labeling with this one so we just label the big lakes. Labeling all the lakes would clutter the map.

8. In the Rendering tab under Data defined click the Data defined override button at Show label.

9. From the drop-down menu choose Edit....

10. In the Expression String Builder write the following expression:

$area > 19000000000

$area is the function to calculate the surface area of polygons in map units.

11. Click OK to apply and close the dialog.

12. Check the box for Show all labels for this layer (including colliding labels).

13. Go to the Text

tab and change the Style to Italic (traditionally, water bodies are labeled with a slant or italic font... it's not a rule).

14. Change the Color of the font to slightly darker or lighter than the lake color - let's try 50% black (#7f7f7f)

Lake Monsters

Now we'll focus on the most important layer in the visual hierarchy, the lake monsters.

15. In the text

tab change the Style to Bold and the Size to 10 points. Keep the Color of the font black.

16. Go to the Formatting

tab and type a comma at Wrap on character. When labels contain a comma, the comma is replaced by a new line character so the labels with two names print each name on its own line.

17. Change the Line height to 0.70 line. his makes the lines closer to each other when there are two lines in a label.

18. Change the Alignment to Center.

19. In the Rendering tab check the box for Show all labels for this layer (including colliding labels).

Now we're done with styling we're going to make some final adjustments.