A graphics or image rendering system, such as a map image rendering system, receives image data from an image database in the form of vector data that defines various features of the map, such as roads, boundaries, etc., in addition to text strings or symbols to be displayed with the features to provide, for example, labels for the features. The label positioning technique generally divides the displayed road feature into a number of road segments and then labels each road segment in a sequence based on an ordered set of labels and a position of each road segment.