Blogs

Road Shields

We are pleased to announce support for road shields for labeling roads and highways, a feature that has been on the TatukGIS to-do list for a long time.

Though it was always possible to use customer created road shields in TatukGIS projects, creating road shields like used for U.S. federal and state road and highway maps was never easy. DK version 11.64 introduces fully integrated support for road and highway shields, like:
 

U.S. interstate highway and route shields.
 

Support for road shields is implemented as an extension to the existing TatukGIS labeling mechanism. Applying a shield to a road class is just a matter of selecting the shield from the library and specifying a font size.
 

The shield setting in the layer properties control.
 

The TatukGIS road shields SVG library is extensive, containing shields for the United States, Canada, and countries in Europe and around the world. The library can be further expanded, so we are open to customer requests and suggestions.

Road shield symbols library.

Shield size is defined by its font size, but auto-scaled horizontally to accommodate labels of varying length. A labels allocator, furthermore, prevents shields from overlapping.
 

Auto-scaling to accommodate label length.