MapServer 4.6.0-beta3 released

[Daniel Morissette]

Ken Lord wrote:
>  
> My map has polygon features that are symbolized using three styles, a 
> solid fill style on the bottom, a style with an ellipse/vector symbol to 
> create a 'hatch' effect, and a cartoline style on top to give a nice 
> anti-aliased outline to the polygon.  The background colour and 
> hatch pattern/colour are different in each class within the layer to 
> reflect dozens of combinations of primary, secondary, and 
> tertiary surficial geology types within that layer's dataset.
>  
> Previously without transparent set to on, you couldnt see through the 
> 'blank' parts of the hatch styles to see the solid fill underneath.
>  
> 'Transparent' may not be relevant or allowable for jpeg's,  but before 
> 4.6b3, the setting had to be within outputformat to turn transparent on 
> for my symbolizations. Perhaps two unrelated systems were using the same 
> parameter.
>  


Um... are your hatch patterns using pixmap symbols? Maybe you need to 
use "TRANSPARENCY ALPHA" in those layers?
 From the mapfile-reference.html:

---
The "ALPHA" symbol directs the mapserver rendering code to honor the 
indexed or alpha transparency of pixmap symbols used to style a layer. 
This is only needed in the case of RGB output formats, and should be 
used only when necessary as it is expensive to render transparent pixmap 
symbols onto an RGB map image.
---


> Perhaps the documentation just needs a note that transparent is not 
> allowable for jpeg's.
>  
> It was definately working in 4.6beta2.  I have beta2 and beta3 (and 
> older versions) installed in separate folders on our webserver, each 
> with all their associated dll's. To switch a website 
> between the versions I just have to point a virtual folder in the 
> website directory to the appropriate mapserver software folder.
>  

It's always possible that someone changed something with respect to 
transparency handling and didn't document the change. If that's the case 
  then hopefully they'll jump in and explain what they've changed.

Daniel
-- 
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  Daniel Morissette               dmorissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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