= 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.