How do you label the Latitude and Longitude of a location in a GPS Coordinate format?

“What is most often known as GPS format, is displayed as (DDD,MM.MMMM) in which seconds are converted to decimal minutes, as a minute value. Seconds have the value of 0 to 60, with 0 and 60 (usually designated as 0 to 59 and then restarting at 0) being the same value, minutes have the same characteristics and degrees are valid from 0 to 180 and 180 to 0, (0 and 180 do NOT have the same value) both North and South of the equator, and East and West of the prime meridian.”

Make the jump to see my solution to a client request.

Hopefully some of you find it useful and/or think of other possibilities that use a similar process. Please offer any other suggestions or comments that any of you may have. This may not be a common need for many, but sometimes the solutions to uncommon needs are the best to know.

We’re going to look at using the General Note label to do this task. My client did not want the clutter of addition Point Objects in the drawing. However, the same process can be done for Point Labels as well.

First, the drawing you’re labeling must be set to a coordinate system otherwise the latitude and longitude values will be blank. In most cases, if you’re using a GPS and other geo-referenced data, you already have this set or preset in your .dwg or .dwt.

Next, let’s look at the typical latitude and longitude label settings using default label properties. Notice that the format options are limited and may not meet your needs.

Since there is not a default GPS format available we need to use an expression for both the Latitude component and the Longitude component. They will be setup the same way as each other.

Let’s see how this is done.

Next, create an expression for the Longitude following the same procedure as the previous Latitude expression.

Now that you have both expressions created, we can look at how they are applied in the label style.

I’ve shown you the two images of how the Latitude is set, now go ahead and setup the Longitude using your Longitude expression.

Like I mentioned at the beginning, this same principle can be used to also setup some Point Label Styles if desired. You just have to make sure that you create your expressions under the Point Label Settings so they are available in the Text Component Editor.

Have fun!