[mapguide-users] Watermarking a Map

[Crispin at 1Spatial]

Hi all you clever folk,

Here is Fridays problem - Watermarking a map.  Not in Fusion, just on a
basic layout.
A common situation is to have to add either a copyright notice or other
watermarking/branding to mapping.
Within the MapGuide environment I have come up with some options -
discussion and suggestions welcome...

 1) Open all the raster imagery and watermark it!  Bit brutal and also does
not account for different scales of mapping based on the same source or
provide ability to always put a copyright notice down in one corner.

 2) Use a low-level WWW service (IIS on Windows) process to intercept the
image and edit before sending it out.  This is "easy" on IIS7/Win2008
apparently due to a new API but I can't get it to happen on lower versions
properly - I watermark the top of the image and truncate the rest.  Plus
this is a Windows only solution could do better:

 3) Add an additional tiled-layer of a standard image overlay.  Create a
complete tile-cache and then replace every tile in the cache with a
transparent watermark image and have that as an overlay to both vector and
raster data.  Can you seed a tile cache tree.  This has the advantage that
is would work for vector as well as raster data but is a bit of a
sledgehammer and also cannot put a notice just on one corner of the map.

 4) Edit the .templ files to include an additional   layer that is turned on
and off somehow according to scale.  The   would need to be on top of the
map and possibly mess up the mouse interaction but has lots of inherent
advantages in positioning, style, network and server efficiency.

 5) Add to the MapGuide server functionality the ability to have a
scale-dependant overlay image 'layer'.  This layer, defined by a static
image could be cantered, stretched, tiled, or placed in one of the four
corners of the map.  This is then built into the final image rendered by the
server and is almost essential functionality IMHO.

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