Hide Negative Values

You may have not noticed, but under the Sign option there is an option to hide negative values.

This capability, along with expressions, can improve how are labels look. Take for example if you want to hide the start or end major station label of an alignment. Previously I used a method where the end major station was shrunk really small, with the hide negative value I can make the station value disappear altogether.

To do that use an expression that returns a negative station value if it is the start or end of an alignment.

Then in the text label component, make sure that the expression’s value is set to hide negative values.

Now when the label is the end or beginning major station label the component won’t show up.

(Rambling on, not quite sure if it makes sense since I’m talking about things I didn’t talk about above, but you may have noticed the + in the above picture: In the case of the label text component above the + will still show. I had to do this since the station character only output doesn’t appear to honor the Sign result, hopefully it will be fixed in future versions. So in this case I wanted to only show the station character and to the right of it, in this case I still needed to shrink the label. For this style I wanted a different look for the beginning and ending major stations from the major stations in the middle. By using two text label components I was able to use one major station label set, but get two different looks depending on where the major station label is located. For the end and start the middle label gets hidden using the hide negative value.)