[Carto] intro

[Paul Spencer]

Hi, just joining the list to participate in the discussions and hopefully help in any way that I can.  From reviewing the list archives, I think most people already know me but for the record I am CTO at DM Solutions Group, a member of OSGeo IncCom, and participant in a number of open source web mapping projects (OpenLayers, Fusion, ka-Map, Chameleon and a couple of non-GIS projects).

My primary interest is to participate in discussions around specifications of the various components, more specifically on the layout side of things.

We (DMSG) have built an in-house PDF generating system written in PHP using FPDF for PDF generation and MapServer to actually render the maps.  We have chosen, for the moment, to render the map as a raster and embed it in the PDF because the current state of the art for rendering to PDF using MapServer is behind the raster output - I'm hopeful that Cairo may level the playing field in this respect, but in the mean time we are sticking with embedding an image.  We use MapServer's new resolution settings to create a larger (in pixel) image that is positioned within a specific physical space in the PDF to produce a higher resolution image, 300 dpi seems to be the sweet spot for most printers, higher resolution doesn't add a lot of visible value.

What I think may be of interest to this group is the specification of the layout of the PDF document, which is completely independent and could be used as the basis for any technical implementation.  Its not perfectly suited to all the goals of this project, but it may serve as a good starting point for discussions.  Our layout specification is defined using the ini file syntax, but it uses similar concepts as the the MapFish YAML configuration file.  Given that these were developed independently, it may be a good indication that these are moderately good abstractions for defining a layout specification.

If you are interested, I can post a wiki page and send along a more detailed description of our layout specification - or perhaps we could start from the MapFish YAML page (http://trac.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish/wiki/PrintModuleServer)

Cheers

Paul

__________________________________________

   Paul Spencer
   Chief Technology Officer
   DM Solutions Group Inc
   http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
   http://research.dmsolutions.ca/