linux program to draw custom maps
Richard S. Crawford
rscrawford at mossroot.com
Tue Mar 29 16:19:24 UTC 2005
The elder gods, manifesting through Henry Hartley, recently decreed:
> On Tue, 29 March 2005 at 10:01 AM Didier said:
>
>>> Does anybody know some kind of program in linux that can draw
>>> custom maps from point A to point B? All parameters should come
>>> from user input and also the program shoud be able to place some
>>> nice graphics in the place of houses, buildings and so on...
>>>
>>> I want to draw a map to indicate to people how to get to point X.
>>> But I wanted to make it more lively instead of plainly drawing
>>> roads and boxes to represent buildings. I want something more
>>> colorful but do not which to resort to something like gimp!
>
> It isn't clear from this if you are looking for something to do some
> manual drawing in (implied by your mention of GIMP) or if you are trying
> to automate the process (implied by the first paragraph). If you just
> want to do freehand drawing, take a look at Inkscape [1]. It's does
> vector drawing so you can scale your output easily. GIMP is not really
> designed for this sort of thing. Also, Inkscape uses an XML file format
> called SVG [2].
>
> If you want to have a map generated programatically, then I'm not really
> sure. I suppose it depends on what sort of map data you have and what
> sort of output you want. You could write something that would generate
> an SVG map based on some kind of map data but without knowing what the
> data looked like, I wouldn't really know where to start.
If that's what the OP is looking for, then mapserver
(http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/) is one approach that I've played with. If
that's the route you want to go, though, you're looking at some serious
time investment in the intricacies and mysteries of GIS.
--
Sláinte,
Richard S. Crawford (AIM: Buffalo2K)
http://www.mossroot.com http://www.stonegoose.com/catseyeview
"We live as though the world were how it should be,
to show it what it can be."
--"Angel", Season 4 ep. 1
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