[OSM-talk] Graphical generation of Garmin maps from OSM data

[Martin Spott]

Please excluse interjection, not being a regular participant in the OSM
project, I'm just monitoring what's going on here.

Nick Whitelegg wrote:

> My idea was a sort of "osmbabel" which would convert .osm to a range of 
> formats,  written in C/C++ for maximum portability (e.g. windows users 
> could just run a .exe) - are there any other formats except shapefile and 
> .img which would be useful to have?

Shapefiles are actually a common and useful interchange format, so this
might be sufficient. On the other hand there's this 'osm2pgsql' program
that creates INSERT statements for PostGIS databases. As shapefiles and
PostGIS tables have very much in common, you might consider to join
forces, make one step ahead and write a driver for GDAL/OGR:

  http://www.gdal.org/ogr/

This toolset already implements almost every aspects of what you exect
from a "babel" translator in the world of geographic vector data.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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