[Carto] intro

[Landon Blake]

I added the link for the MapFish YAML web page to a new wiki section
named "Links" on the OSGeo Cartographic Engine Discussion wiki page:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Cartographic_Engine_Discussion

Landon
Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268
Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658
 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: carto-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:carto-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Paul Spencer
Sent: Wednesday, April 07, 2010 8:20 AM
To: carto at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [Carto] intro

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/


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