Version 3.218b available

[Stephen Lime]

Howdy: Another maintenance release is available. Not many new features but
several documented features now work correctly and some bugs have been 
fixed. Here are the main changes:

 - fixed problems placing bitmapped text
 - fixed multiline bitmapped text rendering problem
 - MAXFEATURES now works correctly with label caching and label overlap removal

(Actually this turns out to be real useful. Included in the distribution is a routine
to sort shapefiles based on numeric fields. It's called sortshp and it's in the shapelib
directory in the distribution. Remember features are labeled using a "last-in-first-out"
scheme. So, you can now sort shapefiles based on area or population (ascending
order) and use MAXFEATURES to only show the biggest or most populus features
ensuring that the largest also get labeled first. I use this with lakes data, showing
only the 100 largest in each view. At small scales this makes sense, no reason to
show every 5 acre lake at a statewide scale. Definite performance increases as
well, but again it only makes sense with sorted data.)

  - fixed bug in selection of polygons with multiple outter rings and islands (faster too)
  - [shpminx] etc. are now projected if necessary
  - empty CGI variables (i.e. title=&name=test+server) are ignored

I'll be adding support for getting label size and angle from .dbf items and support for
dynamically changing layer ordering in the next few days. As always, suggestions
are welcome.

Steve


Stephen Lime
Internet Applications Analyst
MIS Bureau - MN DNR

(651) 297-2937
steve.lime at dnr.state.mn.us