[postgis-users] Another few questions

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Paul Tomblin wrote:
> Bruce Rindahl wrote:
>>> 3. Is there any way to get the corners of a polygon or its bounding 
>>> box out
>>> as separate points?
>>
>>
>> See the documentation on xmin, xmax, ymin, ymax
> 
> What documentation?  In http://postgis.refractions.net/docs/ch06.html, 
> all I can find is "ST_xmin(box3d)".  But experimentation shows I can 
> call 'xmin()' with a geometry, and 'st_xmin()' doesn't exist.
> 
> This is what I find so frustrating about the PostGIS documentation.  
> There are all these functions documented as "ST_*" but it turns out that 
> in order to use some of them, you actually have to leave off the "ST_" 
> part.  This function is defined as requiring a box3d, but nothing I can 
> find in the docs actually comes out and says that if you have a method 
> that takes a box3d, you can call it with a geometry and it will use the 
> bounding box (ok, it does come out and say that for the && operator, but 
> it doesn't say it's true in general).
> 
> I'm really trying to read the manual before asking dumb questions, but 
> the manual is horrible.
> 

Paul,

The manual reflects the current release or maybe svn trunk. I should 
match the current downloadable version. It will be wrong for the earlier 
versions. I would be nice if each vesion of the code that got released 
had its own manual version so people code sync up the release version 
that they might have on their whatever distribution to an appropriate 
manual.

-Steve