Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Label Control

One of the features of Google Earth that the cartographers last week didn't like were the labels.

Screenshot of some placemarks showing labels scaled to perspective by Google Earth.

A request to Google: Currently you can control the scale of labels and their colour (requires you to know how to edit kml directly too) but not the font and their position. Google Earth does a neat trick of moving a label's position depending on what is around it to make it clear and also applying perspective to scale as in the screenshot above. However, when you are arranging the elements of a Google Earth project it would be very useful to be able to fix the position of a label and control its font. For example, if you have a series of placemarks in a line sometimes one of the labels 'flips' to the other side which looks very shoddy.

Poor old Google, they must get sick of users requesting pet features all the time and here am I, just adding to the pile. However, I think there is a wider point here. Google is busy building high tech functionality like photo viewers whilst much simpler functionality is being ignored, I wonder sometimes if they are overly obsessed with sexy high tech rather than dealing with basics.

1 comment:

Rich Treves said...

This posted for Frank Steidl;

I fully agree. I'd like to set the font-family/face for placemarks, too. I like placemarks more than balloons, because the don't disappear when clicking somewhere else in GoogleEarth.
Therefore I tried to create an "homepage" with them.
If you'd like to take a look, visit http://fra.nksteidl.de/GoogleEarth/nhp/willkommen.kml
Also for adjusting the tour options I needed a solution which stays visible while entering the menu of GE application. I did this with an screenshot as overlay.