Legible labels on dense sunburst chart

[John Williams]

I am building a densely-packed sunburst chart (not unlike http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063423), and I need to add labels to it. There are a lot of examples of this, but the examples tend to put the labels inside each arc and they rapidly become illegible. 

What I'd like to do is a kind of force-directed layout on the labels, with lines drawn from the labels to the centroids of each sunburst arc, but I haven't seen any examples of this. Has someone tried force-directed layout of labels combined with more rigid charts, like pie charts sunbursts?

I'm also open to other layout suggestions other than "don't use a sunburst" and "don't show all the labels," both of which are (unfortunately) hard requirements. I'm sympathetic to those suggestions, but can't do anything about them. 

[Chris Viau]

If the labels are very dense, even a relaxed constraint positioning will be hard to achieve, like this example but in polar space: http://bl.ocks.org/syntagmatic/4054247 If you want guaranteed visibility, one trick would be to list the labels on each side and then draw a link to each wedge.

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[John Williams]

That's actually really helpful -- I had not seen the "relaxed constraints" example before. Placing the labels in columns to either side is also an interesting idea, and I'll float that one as well. 

[John Williams]

Thought I'd update this thread -- we eventually went with constraint relaxing and (thankfully) pruning the labels. I put together another example ( http://bl.ocks.org/thudfactor/6688739 ) showing label placement in two dimensions. The routine is still pretty basic -- what we actually went with was complicated by quite a few more constraints -- but I hope this will help someone.