This paper studies the problem of computing an orthogonal drawing of a graph with labels along the edges. Labels are not allowed to overlap with each other or with edges to which they are not assigned. The optimization goal is area minimization. We provide a unified framework that allows to easily design edge labeling heuristics. By using the framework we implemented and experimentally compared several heuristics. The best performing heuristics have been embedded in the topologyshape-metrics approach.