[OSM-talk] New atlas-generation program

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

 > 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.

Would that not make things immensely complicated? I am not familiar with 
the big layout programs but they should be able to request an image from 
web source. So I'd say leave the PDF generation to them, and just offer 
an easy way for them to import our maps as bitmaps. (Or am I missing 
something?)

Since map bitmaps cannot currently be rendered on-demand, we will have 
to supply map bitmaps created from pre-rendered tiles. You've already 
produced the extremely usable "Print View" on the tile browser (which 
seems to be little known - I have added a few selected "print views" to 
the Karlsruhe wiki page and I wonder if such a process could be 
automated?). Why not go further down that route, first creating a 
similar "Print View" that will actually paste the tiles together 
on-the-fly (good for importing into DTP programs, I guess they won't do 
HTML tables), and maybe in a later step even offer exact boundary 
specifications, where the resulting map is clipped to have exactly what 
is wanted.

I should think that any software where you can import pictures from a 
web source will also cache that picture and offer a re-import on demand?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'