Monday 15 November 2010

Single-Sided Buffers in JTS

Due to popular demand I have added the capability to generate Single-Sided Buffers to JTS.

A single-sided buffer is the polygon formed by connecting a LineString to an offset curve generated on one side of the line.

Input Line

Single-Sided Buffer (width = 30)

Naturally either side can be specified, by choosing an appropriate sign for the offset distance (positive for the right side, negative for the left).

Single-Sided Buffer (width = -30)

At the moment there's a bit of a limitation, in that input linework with very narrow concave angles (relative to the buffer distance) create undesirable artifacts in the generated polygon. I'm hoping that some further thinking will come up with a way to avoid this, at least in most normal cases.

This functionality is accessed by setting an appropriate flag in the BufferParameters structure:
 BufferParameters bufParams = new BufferParameters();
bufParams.setSingleSided(true);
return BufferOp.bufferOp(geom, distance, bufParams);

Currently this code is in SVN. It will be released in JTS 1.12 (which will hopefully be shipping before year-end in Q2 2011).