Hints and Tips for Creating a Raster-based Annotations Layer in MapServer

The annotations layer provides an excellent mechanism for automatically placing labels and symbols. For some uses, however, you may want a symbol with effectively no label at all. Unfortunately, many mechanisms for attempting this result in neither the symbol nor the label to display. The following method allows for no (visible) label while still rendering symbols at automatically selected locations.

LAYER
  NAME "shields"
  DATA shield_file
  STATUS default
  TYPE annotation
  CLASS
    TEXT ' '
    STYLE
      SYMBOL [shieldtype]
    END
    LABEL
      MINFEATURESIZE auto
      MINDISTANCE 10
      REPEATDISTANCE 250
      POSITION CC
    END
  END
END

Note the key here being the space character (not empty quotes) for the specified text.