[mapserver-dev] Need Better highway labeling for multiple names and labels

[Lime, Steve D (DNR)]

Steve: I’m assuming on the data side you have multiple road name attributes for each road segment.

Thinking about this I would approach this by augmenting the REPEATDISTANCE operations with a new REPEATOFFSET (default is 0). That way you could add a second set of labels to the same set of geometries with some hope that labels would not collide. I would think this would work best with labels that are of a consistent size, like road shields.

Then from a mapfile perspective you’d draw things twice, in 6.0 it would look like:

LAYER
  NAME ‘highway1’
  TYPE LINE
  LABELITEM ‘road_name1’
  # classes follow using label styles to draw the shields and class styles to draw the linework and no repeat offset
END

LAYER
  NAME ‘highway2’
  TYPE ANNOTATION
  LABELITEM ‘road_name2’
  # classes follow using class styles to draw the shields with a repeat offset
END

So, highway1 would lay down the line work and one set of shields and highway2 would draw a second set of shields offset from the first.

Another idea might be to allow multiple class expression matches. It might be possible to do what you want using one layer definition if a feature could match multiple classes. So you’d have one set for road_name1, one for road_name2, one for road_name3. The set for road_name1 would always draw line work and a first set of shields, the subsequent would do only shields. I’ve never used CLASSGROUPs so perhaps this concept is already supported.

In either case you’d need REPEATOFFSET. Alan could comment on the feasibility of adding that.

Doing things like multiple labels or label items is too disruptive IMHO…

Steve


From: mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:mapserver-dev-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Tamas Szekeres
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2011 4:20 PM
To: Stephen Woodbridge
Cc: mapserver-dev
Subject: Re: [mapserver-dev] Need Better highway labeling for multiple names and labels

Steve,

Wouldn't that be feasible to utilize the REPEATDISTANCE as per MS-RFC-57<http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-57.html> to define the positions? In this case we could define some special character as a separator to split the labeltext into fragments that could be alternated in the subsequent positions.

Best regards,

Tamas


2011/2/12 Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com<mailto:woodbri at swoodbridge.com>>
Hi all,

I just wrote and enhancement request:

http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/ticket/3675

I would be interested in some feedback on this and if anyone has ways to work around these limitations.

Best regards,
 -Steve W
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