Adjusting Text Size

[revrnd]

W/ the Montana 700, I can adjust the text size of Map points, way points, street labels and land cover to be small, medium or large. But when look look @ the display the names for hamlets, villages, towns or cities (regardless of the level of zoom) those names are small. Is there a reason for this or a way to adjust them that I'm not aware of. I will be contacting Garmin about this & my BaseCamp issue later this week.

[robertlipe]

It's not comforting and I haven't looked at a "new" Garmin in a couple of years at this point, but that's the way Garmins have worked as long as I can remember.

Without inside knowledge, but knowing more than a bit about electronic cartography, I suspect the design decision is that those have fixed styles because the style indicates prominence and are thus styled internally based on heuristics like size. Bigger city == bigger, bolder styling that allows it to be picked over a smaller suburb. It's probably better to make a stylistic choice and quickly display "Toronto" onto a map and save the compute-time to even think about whether or not you can render "King East" without obscuring other map details. There may also be safety and support reasons. If you somehow set the waypoint size of your waypoints to be microscopic or invisible, you can probably intuit that it's something that you did and that there's a way on your device to undo that. If Jr. is pushing buttons on your GPS while you're napping and turns off city name labels, the device is much less useful to a lot of people and that may generate a (non-free) support call or email or worse, an RMA or even return. That may not be the reason, but companies do have to think about these kinds of things.

It's possible (though i'd be surprised by this in 2023 - less so in 2003 - that the text is "baked into" the map vectors themselves or even on a raster layer. That would be terrible for translation and even things like rotation, but it would allow faster draw calls, so it was a more common tradeoff back in the old days.

I worked on and with a number of mapping programs and labeling effectively and limited resources (there's ALWAYS a limit somewhere - what works well on the wall-sized map for the weatherperson to touch works poorly on that battery-powered device in your pocket) is much harder than it sounds. It's quite possible that NOT leaving everything to user choice was a conscious design choice. :-)

Let us know what you found out.