Gulf of Mexico object / Rendering of Large Seas

[Minh_Nguyen (Minh Nguyễn)]

@ZeLonewolf

The worst-case scenario for overlapping labels is a sea that is very narrow and runs in a general north-south direction. In other words, the Gulf of California, which looks like this at zoom 4:

This label overlaps land a lot but in my opinion this looks perfectly fine. After all, land labels are dangling into the ocean as well, and that looks okay, and it’s not in the way of any other label that would otherwise render.

This point-placed label may look fine by the standard of avoiding overlapping text, but the Gulf of California is actually a great example of why some mappers probably think it’s beneficial to map some seas as areas. Conventionally, whenever a body of water is long and narrow, a map strings out the label along its “centerline”, spacing out the letters to cover the entire length:

OSM Americana does render line-placed labels for some bodies of water, especially reservoirs like Lake Mead:

These inland bodies of water are mapped only as areas, which are apparently turned into lines when generating the vector tiles. I’d imagine that’s a pretty expensive process compared to piggybacking off a linear waterway feature, such as the Colorado River. A mapmaker could choose to supplement OSM data with a hard-coded line feature, seeing as the Gulf of California doesn’t move very often. I’m surprised Natural Earth doesn’t include sea centerlines in one of its layers.

I agree that it would be overkill to map the boundary of a sea just to get a line-placed label, but maybe a waterway of some sort should be an option for some seas.