Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefano Iacovella
Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Stefano Iacovella

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an opensource server written in Java that allows users to share, process, and edit geospatial data. This book will guide you through the new features and improvements of GeoServer and will help you get started with it. GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you the impetus to build custom maps using your data without the need for costly commercial software licenses and restrictions. Even if you do not have prior GIS knowledge, you will be able to make interactive maps after reading this book. You will install GeoServer, access your data from a database, and apply style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps. Then you follow a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. You will explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as PostGIS, and Oracle. Going ahead, you can display your data on web-based interactive maps, use style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. You will walk away from this book with a working application ready for production. After reading GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will be able to build beautiful custom maps on your website using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Adding labels


We had a full exploration of styling for geometry features, but we have produced maps without any text. Are you wondering how you can represent textual attributes on maps? As in paper maps, you need a labeling engine and GeoServer provides you with the right tool. You can add labels to any kind of feature; let's start with points.

Labeling points

You are probably a geography geek and you know what a place's name is at the first look at the map. However, maps are not always so expressive and common people tend to get confused without some reference text. Do you remember the pretty maps you styled with the Populated Places layer? They would look much better with some labels next to their markers:

  1. Take the PopulatedPlacesStroke.xml file; make a copy to PopulatedPlacesLabeled.xml, and then edit the new file in your text editor. Replace the text inside the <Name> element with the following line of code:
 <Name>PopulatedPlacesLabeled</Name> 
  1. Replace the text inside the...