[mapserver-users] state label placement

[Stephen Lime]

I downloaded the layer myself and will take a look. A couple of things
off the top of my head. MINDISTANCE is given in pixels and only deals
with duplicates. POSITION AUTO uses 8 label points that revolve around
the label point. If you want to center directly upon the label point choose
CC explictly. I think there may be enough info in the label cache to add
CC back into the AUTO placement if no marker is being used, I'll file that
as a bug in bugzilla. Finally, polygon label points are generated as follows:

  - use midpoint of bbox if that point falls in the polygon
  - compute a centroid based on sampling the feature

For odd shaped states (like Mass. or Fla.) the position may not be optimal.

Steve

John R Frank wrote:

> Hi
>
> I'm trying to display a US state boundaries layer that I downloaded from
> nationalatlas.gov.  The labels show up many times.  Even if I crank up the
> label::mindistance and label::buffer it still shows a few and they are
> pushed away from the center of the state!
>
> When I look at this layer in ArcExplorer, it looks _perfect_.  The state
> labels appear once, centered in each state.
>
> How can we achieve this with mapserver?  (we love mapserver).  My states
> layer is below.
>
> John
>
>   LAYER
>     NAME states
>     TYPE POLYGON
> #    TOLERANCE 3
>     MAXSCALE 100000000
>     MINSCALE 10000
>     LABELMAXSCALE 100000000
>     LABELMINSCALE 500000
>     LABELITEM "state"
>     CLASS
> #      COLOR 190 255 190
>       BACKGROUNDCOLOR 255 255 255
>       OUTLINECOLOR 150 150 150
>       LABEL
> #        ANGLE AUTO
>         COLOR 230 0 0
> #       OUTLINECOLOR 0 0 0
>         TYPE TRUETYPE
>         FONT arial
>         SIZE 9
>         POSITION AUTO
>         BUFFER 7
>   #      WRAP " "
>         MINDISTANCE 300000000000
>       END
>     END
>   END
>
> ~