[UW-GIS-L] Labeling coincident points

[Walker Willingham]

In my latest labelling battle with ArcMap (9.1 or 9.2) with an 
ArcView license, I am being stymied in my attempts to appropriately 
label a set of points, where the geocoded results frequently contain 
coincident points for multiple records.

I am making my output a large enough scale so that in most instances 
all of the labels should fit, but because there are so many with 
coincident locations, close to half the labels are being 
suppressed.  I have set my placement properties to allow placement to 
be offset in any direction, but as I do not want the labels to print 
directly on top of each other, have left the Place overlapping labels 
checkbox unchecked.

Ideally I would like every record to be separately labelled, but am 
not too fussy about the labels remaining very close to the 
point.  It's also preferable to have only one symbol per household 
show up - it's only the labels that I want to print for the 
coincident records.  I'd love it if the multiple records were simply 
stacked in the manner of multiple fields when vbnewline is used in a 
label expression.  For instance in this case where 4 individuals are 
coincident (2 is most common for my project):

. Tom Davis
X Mary Sheffield
.  Cindy Davis
. Wade Davis

where X is the location of the point.

Cindy Davis  X  Tom Davis
Wade Davis . Mary Sheffield

would also be OK, though not preferred.

Since these are geocoded locations which I have offset from the road 
centerline, it would be great if the label appeared on the side away 
from the street, helping to clarify which point the label belonged 
to, but that's much less critical.

Much more important to me and my client, is capturing those cases 
where in spite of my best labelling technique the labels are 
suppressed, so that they can be dealt with as special cases later.  I 
don't see any such flagging currently.

I did find an online article which answered almost my original 
question, but which required MapLex - and even so, I wasn't convinced 
that it really addressed my particular needs:
http://mappingcenter.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=ask.coincidentPoints
If it turns out that there is a MapLex solution, but simply nothing 
close with my ArcView license, are there options for using MapLex 
temporarily to solve it without having to upgrade for this one case?

Many thanks,

Walker Willingham
Earth Walker GIS
206-842-4166 (home)
206-914-0440 (cell)
http://walkerwillingham.com