city labels should be biased towards a direction (east/west?) based on bodies of water or proximity to other cities about basemaps HOT 5 OPEN

This doesn't actually work once you factor in map rotation, unless the rotation is available through the Style Spec.

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I'm make an unsupported claim that more than 90% of users don't actually rotate the map...

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Some more detail about what this would look like in practice:

When post-processing the places layer we have access to other data in memory, we can use that data to modify the default value of text-variable-anchor in the style

Cities on the west coast of California can have ['left','right'], Cities on the east coast of Florida have ['right',left'], etc

Can help the labels look a bit more cleaned up at low zooms

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Another option, if this is just for low zooms, is to add the city label text orientation to Natural Earth?

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@nvkelso yeah, that could work too! Otherwise we would need some weighting algorithm - probably based on position relative to water bodies

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