Q:

How to control road labels in Atlas QGIS 2.0?

I'm producing map books for our water assets. These books are taken out into the field by the workers so they can see where various 'things' are for the work they need to undertake.
There are over 200 pages of maps and I've been using the Atlas functionality and I love it.
But my problem is that my road name labels jump around a bit and when the PDF is produced, the road names tend to be truncated and close to the edge of the page.
My roads are made up of segments so in Properties, I have checked the box that 'merges connected lines to avoid duplicate labels'.
In Composer, if I manually move the map, I can see the labels jumping from one location to another. It's not too much of a problem in denser urban areas. But in rural areas where there are only one or two roads, it presents a problem if I don't have a road name or it is truncated.
How can I fix this?

A:

An idea that springs to mind is to dissolve your roads by name and then intersect them using your coverage layer polygons. Then un-check the option to merge connected lines when labelling. In theory this should mean that the center of each nameable road segment is away from the edge of the map - except for some edge cases where a road skirts along the edge of a map but you could solve that by allowing a reasonable overlap between maps so if the name is clipped on one, it is clear on its neighbour.  This is a situation that's common in traditional road atlases.  Though, as Napoleon is purported to have said:  "Campaigns always take place on the edge of a map".  C'est la vie!

