[postgis-users] a question about post gis

[J.J. Green]

Mahdi

> I have read the documentation of post gis and i could not find the
> answer of my question. I want to pass a polygon to post gis and get
> the list of circles with radius=500 meters which can fill that
> polygon. I need to find the center of those circles. I need this for
> educational purpose for one of my papers. Any help is appreciated.

I'm not sure there is a way in PostGIS, perhaps I am wrong.  I came
across a generalisation of this problem (fit ellipses into a polygon,
where the radii and their directions depend only on the position of
their origins) in my work on automated plotting of of vector fields.
The program is called vfplot, details are here:

   http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/jjg/en/code/vfplot/

(GPL source available there).  Were you to define a vector field
appropriately, it should be able to produce the output you're
looking for. Please feel free to contact me offline for details

Cheers

Jim