automatically generating color luts

[Jonathon.Root at agso.gov.au]

G'day,

I was wondering whether anyone has tackled the problem of generating
mapserver lookup tables for layers automatically from arcview avl files?

Our corporate GIS environment revolves around arc/info and arcview.
Consequently I have no end of shape files to serve, unfortunately some of
them have up to 394 different classes to be shaded per layer and up to 30
layers per coverage and it's a bit of a drag to convert them manually to
colorlut, symbollut and legendlabels tables, it's a bit of double-handling
too, considering the avl files have already been created.

I'm about to try automating the process but I thought I'd find out if anyone
else has tackled it first? I'm particularly wondering about mapping the
colorlut to the colorindex file. I can get RGB values out of arcview but
they may not correspond with any of the 256 I've got in the color index
file.

Regards,

Jonathon Root
Australian Geological Survey
www.agso.gov.au
jonathon.root at agso.gov.au