4.3.2 Adding alternate character set support
If you are serving a non-English language service, you may need or want to change the font and character sets.
To specify a font set you need to use the FONTSET keyword which references a file that contains the mappings from the font name aliases, which you will use in your map file, to the actual font file names on your computer.
MAP
NAME BGS_EN_Bedrock_and_Superficial_Geology
# Root layer name
STATUS ON
SIZE 600 600
EXTENT -8.6476 49.8639 1.76943 60.8622
UNITS dd
SHAPEPATH “data”
IMAGECOLOR 255 255 255
FONTSET “fontset.txt”
The path to the fontset.txt file is relative to the location of the map file. In this example (above) then, the fontset.txt file is located in the same folder as the map file.
A fontset.txt file may look like:
arial C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ARIAL.TTF msgothic C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\MSGOTHIC.TTC msmincho C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\MSMINCHO.TTC
You only need one font specified in your map file but you may list as many as you like in your font set file. To get the font specified in the font file to be used by the map service you now need to modify the LABEL section of the LEGEND, as in the below example, which would allow you to display Chinese characters.
LEGEND
OUTLINECOLOR 200 200 200
KEYSPACING 10 10
LABEL
TYPE truetype
FONT msgothic
SIZE 8
ENCODING UTF-8
END
END
The important parts to note in the above example are:
- TYPE truetype (the default is TYPE bitmap)
- FONT msgothic (the font alias we set up in our fontset.txt file)
- SIZE 8 (size should be specified in points, you can’t use words like “small” or “medium” which you do with bitmap fonts.)
- ENCODING UTF-8 (You must also save your map file in this character set encoding).
Section last modified: 31 August 2011.