NO LOCATION NAMES SHOWING ON CHARTS

[Gypsyjon]

I am guessing that I have some setting wrong, but when I look at NOAA ENC charts, there are no names of places etc showing on the charts.

It is hard to tell what area I am looking at with no names.

Can anyone set me straight?"

TIA

[cagney]

Originally Posted by Gypsyjon

I am guessing that I have some setting wrong, but when I look at NOAA ENC charts, there are no names of places etc showing on the charts.

It is hard to tell what area I am looking at with no names.

Can anyone set me straight?"

TIA

Press the "T" on the keyboard........
Next... please have a look at the built in manual or https://opencpn.org/wiki/dokuwiki/do...pn_user_manual

[Gypsyjon]

I have poured over that manual and can find NO info.

[Gypsyjon]

I have SHOW ENC TEXT turned on, but still no place names.

[bcn]

ENC charts? - if you go to Charts|Vector Charts Display| Display category

What do you see? --> screenshot

Do you understand the settings there?

B) more about your system you are running? Which OpenCPN version?

C) and why you are SHOUTING?? Something at FIRE?? Or just the Shift key jammed?

Best

Hubert

[Gypsyjon]

I think I understand what the commands mean.

[Settings]
ConfigVersionString=Version 4.8.0 Build 2017-08-11

I am not yelling and the caps key is not jammed. I put the title of that icon in caps so it would be clear.

I am running Windows 10 Pro

Thanks for any help.

Jon

[Gypsyjon]

[cagney]

Gypsyjon

I suspect that you may have a mix of versions installed. For example your screen-shot of vector-charts settings is not from 4.8.0. With Display category "All" active the entries in Mariners Standard should be grayed out.
Please check your installation, clean out all OpenCPN versions and reinstall.

[rgleason]

Try Uncheck "Important Text Only"

I think that is what you need.

I am curious, is this found under the FAQ, if not perhaps I should add it?

[rgleason]

Depending on how you installed Cagney may be right, but suggest to first try my suggestion, and also his other suggestions, before removal & reinstalling.

[CaptTom]

Not sure if this will help, but be aware that there are far fewer place names on ENC charts than on paper/raster charts.

This is a continual source of frustration for me while underway in unfamiliar waters. And I don't even use OpenCPN underway. It's a common problem with all vector charts.

I think there are two things which contribute to it. First, there just aren't as many place names in ENC charts as there are on paper charts. Not sure why, but it just seems that many, if not most, of the place names were simply never transferred when the chart was digitized.

Second, (and I know nothing about the inner workings, so please correct me if I'm wrong) there must be some way to prioritize layers, so that when you zoom out to a smaller scale, the chart isn't just a jumble of overlapping labels.

This process, too, seems to lose something in the translation. I've been to lots of places where the name of a major port city, harbor, river, bay, or island disappears. Meanwhile, the name of some unimportant inland swamp or hill remains.

Remember that paper charts have been refined over many years (centuries, in some cases) and at each revision, things are added, fixed and updated. Vector charts were all created in one huge push. Probably introducing many errors. Things will be fixed and updated, and over many years they'll get better. But I doubt there's any motivation to restore the missing place names.

[rgleason]

As I said earlier: Try Uncheck "Important Text Only"

I think that is what you need.

[bdbcat]

CaptTom...

All good points.
There is no substitute for a qualified cartographer editing the RNCs over sometimes hundreds of years. The ENCs have fewer labels for sure. And there is no mechanism to prioritize names based upon human ideas of "importance". Inside the ENC, they are all equally prioritized.

It is probably not a good idea for the ECS (e.g. OpenCPN) to try to guess which labels are important. All we can do is draw them all, dropping overlapping labels in the interest of legibility. The labels that get dropped are the last that would have been drawn. But again, there is no built-in priority scheme.

Thanks for the comments
Dave

[Gypsyjon]

Thanks all for the help.

I uninstalled OpenCPN and re-installed, now all is good!!

[CaptTom]

Originally Posted by bdbcat

It is probably not a good idea for the ECS (e.g. OpenCPN) to try to guess which labels are important. All we can do is draw them all, dropping overlapping labels in the interest of legibility. The labels that get dropped are the last that would have been drawn. But again, there is no built-in priority scheme.

Dave, thank you for the education. I just assumed that the ENC data format provided for layers, and that those layers would be in some order of priority.

Every map I've seen, drawn since the very beginning of civilization, showed larger cities and more important geographic features in a larger or heavier font.

I'm astonished that the creators of the ENC format didn't think of this.

These place names, and the variety of typefaces used to depict them, represent a massive amount of data, collected over centuries. It seems sad that it will be lost forever as we move to ENCs.