Refinements are being made to a system which achieves name placement without ambiguity and without overlap. The current system is able to achieve maps of an acceptable quality. Many cartographic conventions are successfully incorporated: avoidance of having a feature and its name separated by an intervening line feature; splitting a line feature to permit a point feature name to overlap it; curving all horizontal point and area feature names to parallel the curving of constant-latitude lines; and placing area-feature names to span the feature. To achieve area-feature name placement that more consistently yields good results, a new approach to area-feature name placement is investigated. The new approach uses a different scheme for abstracting area shape than the medial-axis transform (skeleton) scheme used in earlier work. In essence, it first approximates a given area boundary by means of a polygon of relatively few sides, using the Ramer algorithm.
