Printing To Scale - revisited

[Arnulf Christl]

Kristjan Annus wrote:

> I have used just HTML and CSS
>
> <img src="tmp/1103275875918521.gif" border=0
> style="width:15cm;height;15cm">
>
> You can set the print width and height in cm.
> It works fine in IE at least, I have not tried the other browsers
> because it works in
> specialised application.
>
> Kristjan
>
>> Thank you everyone for the help.  I've decided to look into the PDF
>> option.  Is the built-in PHP PDF API (oh the acronyms!) the best place
>> to start:
>> http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdf.php
>>
>> Or is there something else / better I should be working with?
>>
>> Thanks.
>> -Abe
>
>

Hi,
we implement hq printing by cheating with standard WMS request. What we
do is to first request an image 4*4 times larger than needed for the 72
dpi screen. Thereafter we resize (or compress) the image by the same
factor 4 which gives us 288 dpi on paper which is good for most
printouts. We have no trouble whatsoever with scaling the maps on paper,
the printout is more accurate than standard paper can handle (humindity
index, direction of fiber, etc.).
You do have to tune the WMS though. When addressing a UMN MapServer we
currently maintain two separate MAP files, as the postprocess resizing
also compresses non-scalable objects like texts, symbols and line width
(new parameter THICKNESS for hatches?!). You have the option to use
SYMBOLSCALE, SIZE, MINSIZE and MAXSIZE, etc. but most of the time this
srews the cartography of standard WMS requests. Notice that requesting
larger images changes the scale of an image, MAXSCALE and MINSCALE might
omit layers from the printout where you wouldn't want to.

If I have the time or if there is enough interest we might add our
experiences to the WIKI or docs.

We are keen on having more options with SLD, but I think thats still a
long way to go, starting with the spec. To be discussed at the Open
Geospatial '05.

Cheers, Arnulf.

--
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Arnulf B. Christl
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http://www.ccgis.de
http://www.mapbender.org
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