[Qgis-user] Avoiding Label Clustering and custom placement

[Gerhardus Geldenhuis]

Hi
I wanted to initially ask how do I avoid labels being on top of one another
if data points are very close to one another. I then had a look at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXK_0eEH3hc&feature=BFa&list=HL1319492137&lf=mh_lolzwhich
does to an extent have the answer I was looking for. It appears that
there is not automatic way and that I have to manually do label placement.

However here is my problem, I have imported a set of points from a CSV file
using the "Add Delimited Text" layer plugin. Firstly I could not add any
custom columns that I could use to set my label x and y co-ordinates again.
So then I realized/thought that QGIS would probably not be writing back to
my CSV file, so it wont add additional columns. I then added my own columns
and set the values to 0 but when I set that my data defined positions it
does not work, my labels disappear. I have initialized the values to be zero
so perhaps that is the mistake... or perhaps qgis still can't or wont write
back to the CSV file.

So a number of questions:
Is the CSV file only imported once or is it dynamic so will it thus grow,
shrink everytime there is a change to the file and I reload my project?
How can I add custom writeable attributes to a CSV imported layer, if at
all? Or do I need to "import" the CSV file and convert it to an QGIS type
format?
Am I approaching this the correct way or is there an easier way to customize
my label setting so that I don't have labels overprinting.

Regards

-- 
Gerhardus Geldenhuis
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