d.labels(1grass)

💖 d.labels 💖

okay bestie, so this is d.labels from the GRASS User's Manual — she's a display module and she is so good at what she does, like genuinely. Let's get into it. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

d.labels — she displays text labels (the ones you made with v.label, mwah) onto the active frame on the graphics monitor. that's it. that's her whole job and she ate. 💅

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🔑 KEYWORDS 🔑

display, paint labels

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

d.labels
d.labels --help
d.labels [-i] labels=string  [minreg=float]   [maxreg=float]   [--help]
[--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🫶 Flags 🫶

• -i — ignore the rotation setting and just draw everything horizontally. no tilt, no drama. 📏
• --help — prints the usage summary, aka the "what does this even do" button
• --verbose — verbose module output (she gets chatty 💬)
• --quiet — quiet module output (she goes silent 🤫)
• --ui — forces a GUI dialog to launch, for when you want the pretty buttons instead of the terminal ✨

🧚 Parameters 🧚

• labels=string [required] — the name of your label file. required required, no skipping, this is the main character 🎯
• minreg=float — minimum region size (diagonal) for when labels get displayed
• maxreg=float — maximum region size (diagonal) for when labels get displayed

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

so d.labels displays a paint label file in the active display frame on the graphics monitor. each label in there has its own lil components that decide: the text itself, where that text sits on the image, how big it is, and what background it gets behind it. ✨

and the file? it can be generated with the v.label program, or honestly you can just rawdog it — create it yourself as an ASCII file with a text editor and drop it in the right directory under your current mapset and project. that path is:

$MAPSET/paint/labels/

iykyk. 🦋

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📝 NOTES 📝

ngl, not all the info stored in the label file actually gets used by d.labels. some of that extra info is there for other programs like ps.map to snack on. so don't panic if it looks like stuff is being ignored — it's just reserved for her friends. 💀

also a history moment: this module was formerly known as d.paint.labels. the old version of d.labels from GRASS 5 — the one that gave you interactive placement and modification of paint labels — still needs to have its functionality merged into this module. so basically the glow-up is not fully complete yet, and that's just the way it is right now. 🌈

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• d.font
• d.text
• d.title
• ps.map
• v.label

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

James Westervelt, U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory

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🎀 SOURCE CODE 🎀

Available at: d.labels source code (history)

Latest change: Friday Apr 17 01:04:26 2026 in commit: 32a143358df26b2e518b03c7e0d79541e8d1e5b1

Main index | Display index | Topics index | Keywords index | Graphical index | Full index

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okay so that's literally the whole page, bestie. go display those labels. slay. 💖

and a cute lil sign-off for you: this is all from the GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual, © 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, and the whole thing is GRASS 8.5.0 — periodt. 🌟