Abstract:The text management in map design is a topic generally linked to placement and composition issues. Whereas the type design issue is rarely addressed or at least only partially. Moreover the typefaces especially designed for maps are rare. This paper presents a protocol of tests to evaluate characters for digital topographic maps and fonts that were designed for the screen through the use of geographical information systems using this protocol. It was launched by the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique Research (ANRT, located in Nancy, France) and took place over his 'post-master' course in 2013. The purpose is to isolate different issues inherent to text in a topographic map: map background, nonlinear text placement and toponymic hierarchies. Further research is necessary to improve this kind of approach.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The impetus induced by the development of multi-scale, multi-style maps calls for thinking our resources and protocols with greater interoperability. In the field of toponymy, this requires, in particular, thinking of categories and their structuring with more granularity. Assuming that typography, as a device for visualizing toponyms, is a tool whose potential is still under-exploited, we ask ourselves how the field of typographic design can improve our understanding of toponymic categories and help to structure them in a multi-scale logic. The approach adopted to answer this question is to analyse several existing maps to find good and bad practices. We identified different styles of place names and we built a typology of text features in the surveyed maps. The surveyed maps are the 1&amp;thinsp;:&amp;thinsp;35&amp;thinsp;000 scale, in IGN-France, OSM and GoogleMaps portals.</p>