[mapserver-users] small maps of alaska and hawaii

Bob Basques Bob.Basques at ci.stpaul.mn.us
Tue Feb 23 10:15:54 EST 2010


Julie, 

This may sound like an extreme suggestion, but . . . . 

If you are not going to have a lot of data that is mapped based, as in a lot of different layers, then you could simply move and scale those states (Alaska and Hawaii), you would need to move all corresponding data as well as any overlays that might be added. 

The Site list here doesn't seem to have all that much mapping related data to worry about (yet) and changing all the layers data might be an option.  It doesn't leave much room for tweaking though since and additions would need to take into effect the scale and location difference of the two special states. 

Another possible option might be to add in more map views, this let's the data stay in it's real world position, but allows you to display things along side of each other, and if you weren't worried about scaling the odd states (actually you might be able to handle this as well with some extra work), you could use a image "Sprite" method for pulling the data together on the server, one composite image with three different views, that you could dissect and position for display on the client, same image in three different locations, showing three different views of the same image. This would be a specialized service, but doable, as long as you can map the borders of all the mapviews to the appropriate requests on the server correctly.  I ran into this same problem a few years back, with the added complication of different projections for each mapview. 

bob 



>>> Julie Knoll <julieknoll at gmail.com> wrote:

Thats what I originally thought about doing, but I don't know how I would go about converting it to the right coordinates when the user clicks on the map. The site I'm working on is http://geofred.stlouisfed.org There's so many other things going on server side to calculate the data and what not that maybe its just not worth the effort.

Julie


On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Stephen Woodbridge 
<woodbri at swoodbridge.com> 

wrote:


Julie Knoll wrote:


Hi, I am working on a site that displays thematic data for the United States, and I would like to include small maps for Alaska and Hawaii in the corners of the main map, rather than having to zoom so far out to see them. Does anyone have any suggestions about the best way of going about doing this? Thanks.



This is really a composition problem where you need to compose a single image from multiple separate images. The answer really depends on what media you are using like html, pdf, etc.

If you are trying to do this in a web application I would recommend an approach some like:

Using PHP/Mapscript, generate you three images and then use PHP GD to compose the three images into a single image and then return that to the browser. You can use a similar approach if you are using PDF depending on the PDF lib you are using.

-Steve W



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