[Mapserver-dev] Enhancing mapserver line drawing

[Steve Lime]

I've been disappointed in the  GD antialiased output support. It's
really
slow and somewhat limited. For example (last I checked) you can only
draw single pixel lines antialiased. Styled lines (i.e. dashes) can not
be
drawn that way. GD has no provision for drawing thick lines other than
using brushes.

In MapServer you could use multiple styles and offset them
appropriately
to achieve think lines. Then you could antialias the outside ones.

I think the better approach is to capitalize on cartoline symbol type.
In
this case lines are converted to polygons and filled. An outline could
be
applied that is antialiased.

Steve

>>> <woodbri at swoodbridge.com> 10/21/2003 9:57:42 AM >>>
Hi all,

What if anything has been discussed about drawing thick antialiased 
lines - I seem to remember a discussion that this was not possible 
because we draw thick lines using a symbol. Also maybe the GD 
antialiasing code was slow. What happens when a thick line gets draw 
in Flash or Postscript, etc. It seems that what we should do is 
define lines based on thickness and styles with one style-type being 
a user defined symbol and then let the appropriate output handler 
decide to implement it as appropriate. Is this happening now? Does 
this make sense? For example, if someone wanted antialiased lines and 
the performance hit was ok, they could then build an antialiasing GD 
output module.

Any thoughts or opinions?

-Steve
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