Fifty shades of Roboto: Text Design Choices and Categories in Multi-Scale Maps

Abstract. The impetus induced by the development of multi-scale, multi-style maps calls for thinking our resources and protocols with greater interoperability. In the field of toponymy, this requires, in particular, thinking of categories and their structuring with more granularity. Assuming that typography, as a device for visualizing toponyms, is a tool whose potential is still under-exploited, we ask ourselves how the field of typographic design can improve our understanding of toponymic categories and help to structure them in a multi-scale logic. The approach adopted to answer this question is to analyse several existing maps to find good and bad practices. We identified different styles of place names and we built a typology of text features in the surveyed maps. The surveyed maps are the 1 : 35 000 scale, in IGN-France, OSM and GoogleMaps portals.

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