the delicate art of text replacement

[solarbird]

So I’m redoing the text on the Seattle 2023 bike map, because I figured out that while in digital form on a phone or something it’s okay, printed, it’s REALLY not.

And since the printed poster is the biggest single part of the point of this whole exercise, if I want this actually usable on streets people don’t already know… I have to fix it.

And fixing it means new text everywhere important, and often that means having to block out existing text.

The problem with this is that this sometimes means covering up streets. Not important ones, but streets nonetheless, where the old labels crossed that road and still need to be removed.

Let’s take Mary NW here:

The original small label text for Mary NW crossed a road, probably… 95th street? Honestly not sure. It’s not labelled, so I’m not adding a label of my own.

To remove the old Mary Ave NW label, though, I had to block over it with the background colour. That removed part of a street line.

Now, sure, I could draw another line there and replace it. I’ve done that before and will do again if I have to. But that’s an extra step that I might be able to avoid, right? What if instead of labelling the road “Mary Ave NW,” I just labelled it “Mary NW” instead, and make sure the first vertical of the capital N lies where the street line should be?

There’s no Mary Street so there won’t be ambiguity, so why not?

N 90th Street lower and to the right is doing the same thing. So is NW 90th to the left, but it’s the leftmost diagonal bar of the W.

This isn’t a big flashy trick. If I do it right, nobody will ever notice that I did it. That’s the goal, really. It’s not something anyone should see.

But it is a good example of the delicate art of text placement. Particularly on a map.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Comments

[dewline]

You ain't wrong about any of that!

[solarbird]

I have had very little pushback on this. Which is good. Because, as you note, I am right. xD

[dewline]

I know you're right, just from my own experiences in building star maps for Star Trek-inspired fan fiction. I was having particular issues last night with one project designed to help two serialized Romulan history textbooks.

[stickmaker]

I used to work in the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, Department of Highways, in the Division which (among many other tasks) made the state, county and city maps. I even worked on a few of the simpler maps. Yes, fitting the road names in is not easy, often requiring hard choices and lots of trial and error.

One interesting thing is that Kentucky has many, many odd town names. I use to know the ZIP Code for Granny's Crotch.

[solarbird]

I had started to wonder whether Granny's Crotch was an urban legend or something. Thanks for the reminder that for better or for worse, it wasn't! xD

[wrog]

To remove the old Mary Ave NW label, though, I had to block over it with the background colour. That removed part of a street line.

If I were dictator, all maps would have to be in SVG or some other vectorized format.

[solarbird]

I can go to the PDF, and I can edit it, but holy gods it's a nightmare. Also it uses an $1850 set of fonts that I will not be buying, which leads into my revolutionary manifesto, All Government Documents Must Use Free Fonts Exclusively.

It'll be a bestseller, I'm sure.

[dewline]

Amen, friend.

Also, my federal government needs to adapt to the idea that all its publicly-accessible documents should be free to use.