Some labels overlap. For example, the Heliport label for the Charlton Building in Rochester MN overlaps the label for the name of the building. I’d like to be able to move the label for one or both.
On one map tool I’ve used, when adding a tag, I have a choice of putting the tag above, below, to the left, to the right of the point. This may be useful for small items on OpenStreetMap.
Whether that happens or not depends on the zoom level. In zooming out, I observed another problem: The heliport name becomes dominant, the building name vanishes. Given a choice, the building name should remain, and the heliport name should vanish.
I guess you talk about the map at www.openstreetmap.org. It’s only one map among many. Each map creator likes to put his emphasis on different objects and so they build in rules to decide which objects dominate which and how to place labels according to their map’s focus. And as you already observed the labeling depends on the zoom level. Objects that are not shown in a lower zoom level might appear in a higher zoom level and require a completely different labeling strategy.
So if you were to add label positions to the data you would have to do that for each zoom level and with each revision of the map you’d have to adapt it. A pretty tedious job.
I want to withdraw the original message. In using OSM now, I see that issue only when I am in editor mode. And that came about because i was changing an incorrect building name. In editor mode, until the change is published, both the old name and the new name are appearing.
For the helipad issue, I’d like to somehow say POI A is a part of POI B, so when the map is zoomed out, POI B dominates.
I could try merging the two features, but I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know if OSM has a sandbbox.
I’d advise not trying to achieve your desired label placement. The reason is that the maps on OSM use Mapnik which itself has extremely powerful & complex automatic label placement algorithms. The OSM map shows WAAAAAY more detail than most maps so label collisions are an unfortunate fact of life. Any solution would have to be general - apply sensibly across the world - and not break stuff which currently works.
It’s much better to ensure that the data is accurate. You may find there is another map rendering engine which uses different prioritisation of labels.
One last thing is perhaps raise the B is part of A issue on the GitHub repository for the style. (I suspect this would be too computationally intensive for the main style which runs on data on the fly; but it may be a useful computation for data which has more pre-processing to support rendering).
I was once contemplating more flexible labels positioning for some objects on OSM Carto, but it was rejected:
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/957