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Author: Asa Carlsson Box 5097 Phone: +46 44 206803 Transparent masking, the support to mask only selected objects (e.g., mask a railway, but keep the area objects) covered by an overlaying object (e.g., a text or symbol), has for a long time been a difficult challenge and an expensive task for high-quality digital cartography. The main difficulty has been the lack of support for object-based selective masking in the de facto standard for graphic output files, the PostScript language. Digital cartography has therefore either been restricted to use expensive raster-based techniques or been forced to perform time-consuming interactive editing of objects to be masked. CPS PrePress now presents a completely new approach to solve this problem by combining database-driven advanced symbolization techniques available inside CPS (Cartographics Production System), built on top of ArcInfo, with the raster processing possibilities to produce a single raster output file, ready to be processed by a plotter, printer, film processors, or other publication systems. An integrated, easy-to-use batch solution for transparent masking is finally available for database-driven cartography. |
