Googlish Mapfile

[Bob Basques]

All,

I'm getting close to publishing the MAPFILE I've been working on.  The
results to date can be seen here:

http://gis.ci.stpaul.mn.us/gis/gismo_public/html/?mapbook=/datasets/CONFIGS/SAINT_PAUL/PUBLIC_WORKS/MAPBOOKS/TS/gismo3_test_public.xml#


First off, thanks to those that answered the original query about
MapFiles that were already out there, they helped quite a bit with the
getting started part.

A couple of requests though. 

** Does anyone have any better highway Shield symbols as a TRUETYPE font
that can be redistributed?  I would like to include a set with the
MapFile that's published.

** Does anyone have a good TRUETYPE font that I can add to the
distribution, or is this a non issue?

** Does anyone out there have a need to have the MapFile broken up by
Road classification?  GeoMoose for example is based on the idea that the
user has much of the display control, and separating the display of the
roads into separate layer classes might be plus for some folks.   I
think there is a good reason for this in a dynamic generation interface
because of the performance boost that this could help with.  The basic
idea would be to break out the local roads for example and have them
display as their own layer.  I may implement this in the test interface
above just to test response times.  It would help with my incentive if
there were folks interested in this sort of thing.

Notes:

It's a little slow at some zooms, be advised that there has been little
to no speed optimization applied yet.  It can run much quicker than it
does now, our interest is in a Dynamic image generation, but this could
also be applied to a tiled implementation for OpenLayers for example.

This MapFile is ONLY for the Road network, it does not include the
water/lake, RailRoads, Parks, etc.  I may or may not get to these over
time, we'll see what happens.


Future stuff:

Points of Interest (City names, etc):

** Does anyone have a dataset or pointer to one for Cities with
Populations that can be redistributed.

Thanks

bobb


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