[Mapserver-dev] Enhancing mapserver line drawing

[woodbri at swoodbridge.com]

Steve,

Are there plans to support a cartoline symbol type?

What would this mean for styled lines like: railroad, dashed, streets 
with directionality etc. Would these just be symbols overlayed on the 
cartoline? It also sounds like the cartoline symbol type could be 
implemented differently for each output driver if needed.

-Steve W.

On 21 Oct 2003 at 10:57, Steve Lime wrote:

> 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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