I remember that I have come cross some topics like that when working on an optimization project. This problem is very much similar to automatic labeling or text/icon placement. Some optimization techniques (like simulated annealing, genetic algorithms etc.) can be applied to approach this problem. There is a nice paper talks more detail about this at http://www.lantm.lth.se/personal/lars/ICC2005.pdf (A CASE STUDY OF COMBINED TEXT AND ICON PLACEMENT) Another very good paper by Steven van Dijk is at http://citeseer.ifi.unizh.ch/cache/papers/cs/17282/ftp:zSzzSzftp.cs.uu.nlzSzpubzSzRUUzSzCSzSztechrepszSzCS-2000zSz2000-32.pdf/dijk00using.pdf.

Hope this help.

David Hou

Development GIS
Blockbuster Inc.
(972)683-8021

Inactive hide details for Bill Thoen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Bill Thoen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


          Bill Thoen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

          09/04/2005 10:34 AM


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MapInfo-L <[email protected]>

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Subject

MI-L Automatic Placement of Highway Shields

I've been fooling around with the new US Census Bureau's TIGER data lately
and so now I have large amounts of street data. One of the things I'd like
to do is create layers of highway shields for two or three different
scales, and do it automatically via a little MapBasic routine.

I can easily select the roads I want to label and I can extract the route
numbers from the road names, but the tricky part is figuring out where to
locate the shield symbols so that all are evenly distributed along the
appropriate roads and that no shield symbol obscures any others, and that
no shield lands on a road intersection, etc., etc.

Does anyone have any ideas on how a problem like this should be
approached? Suggestions? Algorithms? Experience?

- Bill Thoen



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