[mapserver-users] SVG text

[Jefferson Williams]

That all makes sense. Thanks for the response.  I guess from my limited
perspective, I lost some useful functionality when Cairo was adopted for
SVG rendering, and it's a bit frustrating; but it does still work.  If they
can integrate that functionality it would certainly be great, even as a
selectable option (either to use text elements or not).

Thanks to you and Thomas.


On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at swoodbridge.com
> wrote:

> On 12/31/2013 9:22 AM, Jefferson Williams wrote:
>
>> When you say "a specific rendering driver"...  I am not a professional
>> programmer and am not trying to speak above my level, but it seems to me
>> that producing a text element in an SVG file is a fairly trivial task
>> compared to rendering the text into vectors, which is what Cairo does
>> now. The text doesn't need to be "rendered" at all, but simply inserted
>> into a text element such as this example from w3.org <http://w3.org>:
>>
>>
>> <text x="250" y="150" font-family="Verdana" font-size="55" fill="blue"
>>  >Hello, out there</text>
>>
>> Thoughts? I realize that this is a Cairo issue, not a Mapserver issue,
>> since the SVG rendering was moved out of Mapserver; but would you agree
>> that this would be a fairly simple task from a programming perspective?
>>
>
> The concept is simple as you state, but you are missing the expectation
> that the SVG text looks simpler if not the same as the text rendered by
> other drivers. So while you only have to dump the text there is still a lot
> of work to compute the size, position, scaling, orientation, etc for that
> piece of text and then you have to also deal with text rendered along a
> line which is rendered as glyphs not strings, not to mention how you want
> to deal with rendering texts like Arabic and other script like texts.
>
> So yes, straight forward until you start trying to make things like
> similar. If you got an SVG where you only needed to change one text string
> but instead had to fiddle with all of them because of the above issues,
> that I think would not be a good solution.
>
> My guess today if you take an SVG file into something like inkscape, it is
> a fairly easy process to window the text vectors and replace them with a
> new text element, even if it is annoying.
>
> That said, I'm not saying that this is a bad idea as I can see it might be
> very useful. I'm only trying to set an appropriate expectation to the size
> of the effort. I'll leave the details to Thomas.
>
> -Steve W
>
>  On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 7:14 AM, thomas bonfort
>> <thomas.bonfort at gmail.com <mailto:thomas.bonfort at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Jefferson,
>>     There is currently no way to produce those elements with mapserver,
>>     and to my knowledge there are no plans to do so yet. A specific
>>     rendering driver would need to be implemented to achieve this, but has
>>     not yet been funded or proposed.
>>
>>     regards,
>>     thomas
>>
>>     On 24 December 2013 17:42, Jefferson Williams
>>     <jefferson.d.williams at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:jefferson.d.williams at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>      > I'm a long-time user of PHP Mapscript and have written code to
>>     produce maps
>>      > for Wikipedia.  Older versions of Mapscript produced SVG files that
>>      > contained text elements.  In more recent versions, text is
>>     produced as a
>>      > series of vectors instead, which means that the text cannot be
>>     edited.
>>      > Often auto-generated maps need to be tweaked in various ways
>>     before they are
>>      > ready for the public. Now I can move text, but I cannot edit it.
>>      >
>>      > Is there a way with 6.2 or 6.4 that labels can be produced as
>>     text elements
>>      > in the resulting SVG file?
>>      >
>>      > --
>>      >
>>      > Jeff Williams
>>      >
>>      > _______________________________________________
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>>     <mailto:mapserver-users at lists.osgeo.org>
>>
>>      > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Jeff Williams
>>
>>
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-- 

Jeff Williams
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