CVS ok now, 3.4 news

[Stephen Lime]

I hammered out most of the bugs in TTF lines so the CVS
should be cool. This marks the change to version 3.4 in
development terms. 3.3.012 will never see an official
release. There are enough new features to warrant the
3.4 tag. 3.4 will not be released formally until the 
generic query module is ready to allow simultaneous
access to shapefile, SDE and OGR datasets (as well as
tiled shapefiles).

That said, the current CVS code is very stable and the
generic query stuff should be a seemless upgrade (i.e.
you won't notice). If you've had problems with 3.3.011 
then you might want to try a recent nightly build.

The TTF line feature allows you to plaee symbols at 
different intervals alogn a line (rotated of course).
This allows for nice railroad symbols, directional 
arrows and meteorological (sp?) symbols. There will
shortly be an ARROW type that will allow you to turn 
lines into, you guessed it, arrows. Gone are STYLED 
lines with goofy offset, dash patterns that never 
really worked right anyway. In its place are more 
flexible dashing options to do .. _ . _ .. type
patterns. Overlay symbols allow you to create complex
road symbols with only a single pass through the data.
I'm working on a couple of TTF fonts for arrows and 
other typical uses of fonted lines.

The CVS also contains a TCL/TK mapscript configuration
section (thanks Tom). This serves as the base for the
recently announced MapServer workbench. It looks very
nice and I suggest folks take a look at it.

Steve