linux program to draw custom maps

[Henry Hartley]

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.

I'm working on a script to take a database of plants and display them on
a map of a garden.  I'll have different symbols for different types of
plants and display them at different scales and different shades of
green depending on the size and color data associated with each plant.
The script will generate an SVG file that can be viewed in a browser (as
long as you have SVG support [3]).  The plants will be labelled with
scientific and common names.  If you click on a plant, you go to a page
with detailed information about and photographs of the plant.  Since SVG
is just plain text, it's easy to generate with Perl or PHP.  But I know
what my data looks like.

[1] www.inkscape.org
[2] www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG
[3] www.mozilla.org/projects/svg

-- 
Henry