Feature Request: Custom Annotation Control

[imap@…]

At certain mapscales, I'd like to display a state/province name
annotated with spacing between the letters, like you might seen
on printed cartographic maps...  ie.  A L B E R T A
or: P E N N S Y L V A N I A

This isn't something I want to hardcode into the data, but it
would be a nice feature to have a keyword (charspacing) or some
such to accomplish the task.  Probably a knarly task, but I 
will throw the idea out there anyway...  

Regards,

Chris

[dmorissette]

Can't be done in 4.0 for sure, maybe in a later release.

FYI the http://maptext.com/ guys are thinking of building an extension for 
MapServer 4.1 that would do this kind of stuff and much more.  This wouldn't be 
free so we might still want to consider enhancing MapServer's own labelling to 
do that as well.

[sdlime]

I agree, don't want to ditch it, not until we see how the MapText stuff works
out and especially what the pricing is going to be. My guess is that we'll
eventually have to add even more advanced labeling and this one's probably not
that hard to do (just adding a bunch of spaces between letters).