[Mapserver-users] Random Issues

[William Carty]

Hello,

I'm not a GIS person, but I'm trying my best :)

For the past few weeks, I've been working on getting the phpGIS 
(http://www.phpgis.org) application up & running for our county GIS 
department.  This app uses mapscript as the backend.

In deploying & testing I've run across a few issues I'd like to bring up 
here.  I've done (or am doing) my best to find an answer on my own, but 
obviously haven't in every case...

1.  "MapServer Error in msDrawShape":

      I'm having a problem with one of my layers (roads).  The layer is 
a line shape & does not work at the full extent of the map (zoomed all 
the way out).  When I try to view this layer at the full extent, I get 
the error: "Warning: MapServer Error in msDrawShape(): Only polygon or 
line shapes can be drawn using a line layer definition."  Now, if I set 
the MAXSCALE attribute in the map file so that the roads layer is only 
visible after zooming in, the layer works fine.  Also, if I change the 
layer to a point instead of line, it works fine at any extent.

Based on what I've read in the archives, it looks like others have had 
this problem.  The fix I've read about has been to "clean up" the 
arcview shapefile.  I've had our GIS folks "clean it up" as much as they 
say they can, but the problem still exists.  Is there anything else I 
can do to get around this?  I really want to have the roads displayed at 
the full extent, but don't want to have to use a point layer.


2.  Railroads

     This may seem like a silly question, but what sort of symbols / 
images do you folks use to represent railroad tracks?  I've tried making 
a few symbols by hand, but nothing looks quite right :).  I'd rather not 
use a regular line, I'd rather have railroad tracks.


3.  Fonts / Labels

     I'm still reading the how-to's, but I thought I'd go ahead & throw 
this one out.  So far as I can tell, there isn't much I need to do to 
get fonts to work for text labels.  Basically copy them over, create the 
fontlist file & then create the pointer in the map file.  Is this 
basically correct, or are there any gotchas I should watch out for when 
setting this up?  (On a Linux box)

Think that's about it for now.

Thanks!

Will

William Carty
Washington County Virginia
Webmaster
Department of Information Technology