Curious Symbol Structure

[Manfred Meier]

Hi,

I am interested in an answer on this question from an expert, too.

What I hope I understood from many little parts of information is: 
Specially for drawing thick line (line width > 1) you need a "pen". And 
think of the tip of the pen as being a circle or en ellipse. So your 
thick line is drawn by putting many ellipses one after another.

A long time ago I read in a documentation for the "old" GKS about an 
optimization algorithm. Because you don't need to calculate the whole 
ellipse for each step.

I hope, this explanation has some truth in it!

Greetings
Manfred





Bill Thoen schrieb:

> I'm trying to learn the MapServer lore and now I'm focusing on symbols. Can
> anyone tell me what the logic is where one is defining a _line_ style by
> using a TYPE of ELLIPSE (instead of LINE) and POINTS definition of one (x
> y) as in the symbol definition below? (This is from
> http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/reference/symbology/examples).
> 
> SYMBOL
>   NAME 'dashed1'
>   TYPE ELLIPSE
>   POINTS 1 1 END
>   FILLED true
>   STYLE 10 5 5 10 END
> END
> 
> I'm just curious. This seems like some historical artifact from the days
> when learning MapServer was hard. ;-)
> 
> The TYPE ELLIPSE seems especially weird to me. Why not TYPE LINE?
> 
> - Bill Thoen
>