[OSM-talk] New atlas-generation program

[OJW]

The obvious benefit of our slippy map is that it's a neat online web view of 
OSM.  But the availability of map tiles could potentially benefit many 
projects, as demonstrated by the WorldWind plugin among others. 

Today, I'd like to announce a program that can create printed books and 
atlases from OSM tiles.  It's labelled "image Atlas" in SVN, but really 
that's just one use for this document-production system, and I hope that 
people will find more things to create with it.  

There's a sample output, showing photos, full-page maps, multiple maps per 
page, etc.

http://almien.co.uk/OSM/Atlas

To control it, you just say what images, maps, text, etc. you want to put on 
each page and where to put them:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/ImgAtlas/Commands

Output quality is variable using a DPI setting - the higher that is, the more 
data it needs to download, and the better the PDF quality (and filesize) will 
be.  I've put a reasonably low setting for the demo to bring it out as 2.3MB.  
Changing DPI shouldn't affect your map positions on the page, or their 
coverage.

In future, one of the priorities would be making it easier to do 
professional-style page layout.  One idea is to import pages that you created 
in a DTP tool (QuarkXPress or whatever) from a PDF file, and overlay the maps 
onto those pages.

Comments welcome of course, especially regarding usability.  Program is in 
Perl, and requires PDF::API2 and GD.  

Regards,

OJW


p.s. yes there are plans to cache the tiles locally, to reduce its effect on 
the dev server...  also to have a "no download" mode which lets you rearrange 
things on the page without regenerating the maps.