[mapserver-users] force labels to fit in polygons

[Stephen Woodbridge]

On 3/5/2012 4:44 PM, Mark Volz wrote:
> Hello,
> Is there a way to force labels to fit inside of a polygon, even if a
> polygon is irregularly shaped? I noticed that with POSITION AUTO labels
> are falling outside of my soils boundary.

The short answer is no. It is an interesting problem, but it does not 
have a guaranteed result as the label might be too big to fit 
regardless. I am not even sure of the algorithm should be for something 
like this. There are a lot of parameters like:

font
font size
wrapping the text
changing the angle
finding the longest line, arc or smooth polyline that fits withing the 
polygon and then have the text follow that line

These are all computationally expensive to do on the fly while 
rendering. Ideally these should be worked out in advance then you can 
supply the attributes to the label via binding columns in the data.

-SteveW