Practical GIS

Adding labels

Now that we have some roads, we should also add some labels to them. Maps at this scale usually do not contain street names, but road numbers. For higher-degree roads, OpenStreetMaps delivers these road numbers in the ref column. First, let's create a simple labeling by opening the Labels tab in our layer's Properties. We can enable labeling by selecting the Show labels for this layer option, and choosing the ref column. If we apply this, we can see our road numbers on the canvas, however, it is far from an appealing map.

In the labeling window, we have a lot of options to customize our labels. Let's start with the Text tab. As the default text size is quite large, we can set our font size to 8 points. Also, change the color ...