Neil,
Looking through your post, and by virtue of using the SDE 9.2 plugin,
I'll assume you are connecting to ArcSDE 9.2.
First, what does the output of sdetable -o describe say for your
SpeciesLabel column about the column data type? Is it NSTRING?
Here's the story on unicode characters and MapServer+ArcSDE 9.2... As
long as your characters aren't wide format, ie UTF-8'ish, they should
be printable and usable with the iconv support in GD/AGG. If they are
wide, however, they are garishly converted down to UTF8. My rational
for this approach is that many of the Arc tools emit unicode columns
for string data in 9.2 SDE layers, but much of the time, people don't
want/need that, and they are storing ASCII or LATIN-type data in them
anyway. MapServer internally does not support wide characters,
however, so there are some significant limitations in this approach,
and if MapServer is converting your wide characters down to UTF8, you
are pretty much screwed. Another huge limitation of this approach is
that it is really only usable for labeling things. You cannot use any
expressions on NSTRING columns in ArcSDE with MapServer and expect to
do anything.
You shouldn't have to specify an encoding for the SDE layer because
any NSTRING columns (which SDE stores as UTF-16) are smashed down to
UTF8, which iconv/GD/AGG can render and deal with.
All of this blather says that the unicode support for MapServer is
very immature, and if you can reload your ArcSDE layer to use regular
string columns in your ArcSDE layers, things should work much smoother
and as expected.
Howard
On Jan 6, 2008, at 4:12 PM, Neil Fincham wrote:
Hi Ed,
Thanks for the quick reply, a picture says 1000 words so I have
done a
screen dump out of ArcVIEW for you.
I have tried a few different fonts and a few different string fields
from the SDE and get the same result with the string's, the integers
and
<Null>'s render fine and using a shape file exported directly out of
the
SDE also works fine.
Very puzzling
Neil
Ed McNierney wrote:
Neil -
Could you give an example of the text in one of the SpeciesLabel
fields? What alphabet, character set, and language is the
SpeciesLabel field stored in? If you switch to a different FONT
does the output change?
At first glance you appear to have code points in the label that
are not representable in the selected font. That might not be the
problem, but it's worth eliminating - hence my questions above.
- Ed
Ed McNierney
Chief Mapmaker
Demand Media / TopoZone.com
73 Princeton Street, Suite 305
North Chelmsford, MA 01863
Phone: 978-251-4242, Fax: 978-251-1396
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Neil Fincham
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 3:37 PM
To: MAPSERVER-USERS@LISTS.UMN.EDU
Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Unusual Fonts
Hi all,
I am really enjoying my first delve into mapping and like to say
thanks for the great software.
I am havering a bit of a problem and I am sure it is something
easy, I am getting unusual fonts rendering using SDE. It works
fine with the shape files but with SDE the text parts come out
wrong. I have attached a sample.
Here are some bits from my mapfile;-
OUTPUTFORMAT
NAME 'AGG'
DRIVER AGG/PNG
IMAGEMODE RGB
END
LAYER
NAME LandUnit
METADATA
"DESCRIPTION" "Land Unit"
"RESULT_FIELDS" "ForestCode Description"
END
TYPE POLYGON
STATUS ON
CONNECTIONTYPE PLUGIN
PLUGIN "/ms4w/Apache/specialplugins/msplugin_sde_92.dll"
CONNECTION "palustris,port:5155,d,ms_user,p4ss\/\/ord"
DATA "d.DBO.LandUnit,SHAPE,SDE.DEFAULT"
TOLERANCE 5
TEMPLATE "ttt_query.html"
CLASS
SYMBOL 0
COLOR 255 255 255
OUTLINECOLOR 0 0 0
TEXT ([SpeciesLabel] [YOE] [AreaHA]ha)
LABEL
FONT "vera"
TYPE truetype
SIZE 8
BUFFER 1
COLOR 0 0 0
BACKGROUNDCOLOR 255 255 255
WRAP " "
ENCODING UTF-16
END
END
END # Layer
The [SpeciesLabel] is the one with the problem, the "[YOE]
[AreaHA]ha"
are numbers and render correctly. I have tried various ENCODING
types to no avail.
Thanks for your time
Neil
<fonts.jpg>
