QGIS Server (the ‘map’ part of the name has been dropped) is an awesome way to publish maps and you can make really good looking cartographic products with QGIS. I have been building out a good looking online map for a client and I suddenly realised that we don’t have any way to do road shields. This weekend I hacked together basic support for label shields. It integrates with the labelling-NG tool in QGIS master. Currently it provides only basic options – distance from label at which to start the shield and the shield colour. Only rectangular (with slightly rounded corners) shields are currently supported. In the future we could do lots of other fancy shield types and allow setting outline colour, use a gradient for the background, different shapes and so on. In it’s current rather basic configuration though it suits my immediate needs and probably I will add to it as the need arises.
Shield options (click for larger view)
Yes the screenshot is taken in windows – something for a future blog post 
Here is a little sample of what you can do with shields (click for larger image):
Some contrived examples of using the label shields
If you want to try it out, it is in my github clone here:
git remote add timlinux git://github.com/timlinux/Quantum-GIS.git git fetch timlinux git branch --track shield-labels timlinux/shield-labels