Boston Free Map

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 09:29:30AM +0200, Zhonghai Wang wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> nice application!! in addition, I have some questions here:
> 
> 1. are you using PNG24 for the output format? the map image is not so
> "clear" if the map is zoomed to biggest map extent. I noticed that you
> defined several output formats in the mapfile, are these just simply
> duplicated defenitions or for some other purpose? normally I define only one
> outputformat, for example PNG24 or GIF.

This map is designed to be used in a variety of applications, and I
have, in the past, used every single one of those output formats ;) The
current format is actually JPEG -- the reason for this is that:
  * PNG8 (dithered png) has problems with not having enough space in the
    color table with antialiasing
  * PNG24 takes too long to load -- the images are about twice as large
  * GIF suffers under the same problems as PNG8, plus the AA doesn't
    look as good

> 2. do you label the street names with some special softwares? the street
> names are labeled very nice along the street curves. If you don't mind, can
> you give some more hints about this? (I attached a desktop capture for
> this.)

ANGLE FOLLOW does this for me -- this is a relatively new development of
Mapserver, and I'm not sure when it came into place: the Freemap server
runs Mapserver out of CVS, so some aspects of it may be not be released
yet. (Someone else can probalby comment better on that.)

> the application is really very fast, good job.

Thank ka-Map for that :) Paul Spencer's tile.php work is the only reason
that this application is as usable as it is: rendering this much stuff
simply didn't work, and without the metaTile generation, the buffers
would simply have killed the number of labels you're seeing.

I'm really happy with how it's come out, and I'm glad to see that others
like it too!

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer