[OSM-dev] Garmin IMG, shapefile creation etc

[Nick Whitelegg]

I've heard back from Oliver, the developer of the QLandkarte application. His 
aims are more to develop an .img displaying program, rather than an .img 
creator/editor, but he's given some useful information.

One thing I think would be really useful, therefore, is to develop something 
like QLandkarte but which is optimised for .img creation - basically, a 
Free .img file creator. It could use OSM data, SRTM data, other free sources 
of data, or even allow users to just draw their own maps much as existing 
closed-source .img editors do. This could perhaps be called "OpenGPSMap"

It seems that there are several development tasks that need to be done, 
relating to both .img and shapefile creation - in perhaps this order. I'm 
favouring C/C++ as many of the tasks involve library creation and C/C++ 
libraries are probably the most reusable and dependency free:

1. Develop a C/C++ OSM SAX parser using libxml. Probably not too difficult as 
many OSM parsers exist already. This could be used as the basis for just 
about everything below.
2. Develop OSM to shapefile conversion code.
3. Develop a .img writing library, using existing .img reading and writing 
code as a guideline. 
4. Develop a web-based .osm to .img converter
5. Develop code to upload .img to a Garmin device - already done in QLandkarte
6. Develop the "OpenGPSMap" application itself.

I'll try and make a start on some of this over Christmas if people think it's 
a good plan.

Nick