This is a great starting point for labeling capabilities.
I like your sense of humor. 29 pages of dense PDF on Maplex, ESRI's magnum opus that encapsulates 40 years of desired labeling options, is probably a bit beyond a "starting point." :-) I admire Maplex for many reasons, but even ESRI is the first to say it is not for everyone. That's why things like ArcGIS Pro have options to use Maplex or to use a simplified label engine. Maplex is also only part of the picture, as there are two sides to the labeling coin: formatting and placement. Placement is the decision of what appears and where it appears. Formatting is how it is rendered, with issues such as font, size, orientation, color, effects, accessory graphics, etc. Beyond that there are two challenges for labeling. The first is by far the hardest: it is creating a default labeling engine which in most cases works well without any user intervention, and which, further, provides a relatively small set of optional settings that users can adjust to allow it to work even better in specific cases. The second challenge, creating a massive thing full of options like Maplex, actually is easier. That is especially the case since ESRI has thoughtfully provided an illustrated guide for anyone who wants a canonical list of what should be implemented in such an engine. So... most interesting to hear would be: Basics: What are the capabilities that you tend to use day in and day out for workmanlike presentations? What is the smallest list of features, in formatting and in placement, that covers that? Advanced: Taking Maplex as a convenient reference point for placement and taking ArcGIS Pro for formatting, of all those features which of them do you actually use with reasonable frequency? I want to emphasize that the hard part is not clobbering people with thousands of features and controls. That's easy. The hard part is paring down that list of endless features to the most compact default set. We want to do that primarily because doing so makes it far easier to learn the product, to remember the product and to operate it in most tasks. If that initial minimum part is done right it is OK to have a second level to access more advanced or less frequently used features.
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