This was supposed to take me a few weeks to get around to… but a miss-spent afternoon at work…

I have added a dataset to the wiki that produces a map demonstrating all of the area symbols and their interactions with each other and other entities.  It produces an A3 approx map at 1:1000.  It is set up to allow users to add their own symbol customisations without too much effort, and to easily allow switching from the default or various preset symbol sets.

I see I forgot to add a 10m grid to the map to give a sense of scale.  Perhaps I’ll add that in due course…

http://therion.speleo.sk/wiki/doku.php?id=examples#all_areas_all_symbol_sets

Some things I learned during the process.

The transparency of areas with filled backgrounds in pdfs is quite different when viewed with Adobe and Foxit Readers.

Adobe renders them opaque, and Foxit renders them translucent (except for area u:) and except for objects that explicitly have –place bottom set and except for my custom area water and area sump.  This difference in behaviour persists through to the printed documents as well.  At least that’s how it behaves on two computers I use.

Objects with –place bottom are always completely obscured by areas with default placement regardless of the viewer.

Objects with –place top render the same as objects with default placement over areas with default placement in both viewers.

The Foxit behaviour is preferable I think, although you can never get a rock that looks like it is definitively ‘high and dry above the water’, unless you say, draw two rocks, one directly above the other.

Therions sketch-warp algorithms perform very badly where the transformation applies a ‘squash’ in the y-axis and a stretch in the x-axis.  The lower and upper thirds are transformed nicely and the middle third is scrunched beyond recognition.  Adding extra survey stations to try to distribute the distortion is not particularly effective.  I have samples if anyone is interested, but perhaps too large to distribute on the forum.

A behaviour of map-comment (concatenation vs replacement) that was partially implemented on my behalf some time ago remains partially implemented. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gis.therion/1424/match=map+comment  Would it be possible to make it so that repeated map-comments in the same layout concatenate rather than replace previous instances as described in that post?

Bruce