In my opinion, the force layout is unsuitable for the purpose of placing labels on a map. The reason is simple — labels should be as close as possible to the places they label, but the force layout has nothing to enforce this. Indeed, as far as the simulation is concerned, there is no harm in mixing up labels, which is clearly not desirable for a map.
There could be something implemented on top of the force layout that has the places themselves as fixed nodes and attractive forces between the place and its label, while the forces between labels would be repulsive. This would likely require a modified force layout implementation (or several force layouts at the same time), so I’m not going to go down that route.
My solution relies simply on collision detection: for each pair of labels, check if they overlap. If this is the case, move them out of the way, where the direction and magnitude of the movement is derived from the overlap. This way, only labels that actually overlap are moved at all, and labels only move a little bit. This process is iterated until no movement occurs.
The code is somewhat convoluted because checking for overlap is quite messy. I won’t post the entire code here, it can be found in this demo (note that I’ve made the labels much larger to exaggerate the effect). The key bits look like this:
function arrangeLabels() {
var move = 1;
while(move > 0) {
move = 0;
svg.selectAll(".place-label")
.each(function() {
var that = this,
a = this.getBoundingClientRect();
svg.selectAll(".place-label")
.each(function() {
if(this != that) {
var b = this.getBoundingClientRect();
if(overlap) {
// determine amount of movement, move labels
}
}
});
});
}
}
The whole thing is far from perfect — note that some labels are quite far away from the place they label, but the method is universal and should at least avoid overlap of labels.
