Curious Symbol Structure

[Steve Lime]

The type refers to the base type of the brush or marker you are creating
not
to the type of feature it is useful for. It's true in this case that
with the addition
of the style that this symbol is only really useful for lines, but you
could draw
markers with it or fill polygons in which case the dashing would be
ignored.

I think ideally we should pull the style, better called a pattern, out
into the
class style. That would eliminate this type of confusion...

Steve

>>> Bill Thoen <bthoen at GISNET.COM> 12/26/2006 7:42:59 PM >>>
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