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Filling dot maps with a regular pattern is a key step in visual representation of land use data. The traditional methods cannot adapt well to shape features of complex areas, leading to an unreasonable symbol arrangement in the inner region and area boundaries during symbol filling. For this reason, a dot symbol auto-filling method of complex areas considering shape features is proposed in this paper. First, based on the constrained Delaunay triangulation, the internal structure of a complex area is divided into three simple filling areas denoted tile type, narrow type, and point type. Next, according to the geometric shape features, these three type areas are filled with plane, line, and point level of symbols respectively. Finally, the dot symbols near to boundaries are adjusted on the basis of the boundary constraint to optimize the symbol-filling effect. Based on the national data of a region in Guizhou Province, the method proposed in this paper is compared to the traditional symbol filling methods for validation. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the dot symbol sufficiency of complex areas, and the edge of dot symbol group closely adhere to the boundary and conform to the extension characteristics of boundary without creating spatial conflicts such as spatial overlap, the filling result can better reflect the shape features of the areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]