image mode and tiles

[Stefanie Weykam]

Hi list,

I have set the output format to PNG and the image mode to RGBA in order to
get enough colours to display raster and vector layers. But now
'transparency' must be ON and this turns the legend and map background gray
(when no raster is displayed) and also affects some of my symbols. What's
the best combination for output and image mode in this case? What can I do
with the Alpha layer?? I have gone through the Raster-How-To but still don't
get it strait.

I am also struggling with tiles. I have chopped down a satellite image with
the Gdaltindex program. Everything works fine but I expected to actually see
how the scene is drawn tile by tile. Instead I still get the odd Venetian
blinds (doing several passes and taking too long for the impatient user). I
have not yet created low resolution overviews but -  is this the way tile
visualization ought to be? The scene is resampled to the map projection so
this might additionally slow down the process.

Thanks for any comments,
Stefanie Weykam

Using MapServer/MapScript 4.2 on Win2000