Andrea Aime wrote:

> There is this common fallacy that the centroid is a good label point, while 
> try in
> most simple cases there is no guarantee it actually falls inside the polygon
> (think of a doughnut), a label point instead should always be inside or at 
> worse
> on the border (which is something the labeler in its default configuration 
> guarantees instead)

I made a quick test with 22339 rather complicated polygons and PointOnSurface 
function in Spatialite.  Result looks pretty good with all the points well 
inside their polygons which was a nice surprise. I was remembering from the 
past that point on surface is not usable for labeling because when I last tried 
the same function with Oracle it simply placed the points on surface into the 
first outer ring vertices. Perhaps Oracle does it in a more clever way 
nowadays.  Somehow I feel that PostGIS behaves a lot like Spatialite.

I feel that point on surface could be a reasonable candidate for label anchor 
point. Problem with Geoserver is that all backends would not behave in a 
similar way. It could perhaps be possible to a sort of a simulation by creating 
a point layer with PointOnSurface and  use that for labeling. Perhaps it does 
not tell anything about how well partial labels from adjacent tiles match.

Those who use tiles can motivate themselves to coding by thinking that if the 
system is able to match partial labels there would be no need for creating 
oversized metatiles. This could mean less pixels to create when seeding the 
cache and thus more speed. 

By the way, can Geoserver utilize several geometry columns in one table in 
Oracle, PostGIS and Spatialite? If yes, users could pre-process the data and 
create label points into their own geometry fields, as well as simplified 
geometries to be used at small scales.  It would not make database much bigger 
because there would be no need to copy the attributes.

-Jukka Rahkonen-




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