[OSM-talk] [HOT] Fw: Disaster Preparedness Project

Graham Jones grahamjones139 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 8 07:43:03 BST 2011


Hi,
I have something which is probably 80% of the way to what you want - I
developed a little program to produce paper maps in parallel with maposmatic
(http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TownGuide) - I did not know we were
working on such similar programs.

Because they were developed in silos, the code is completely different - My
townguide program uses a PDF generator library (reportlabs) where you
specify the layout of the page, then put content into it.   This meant I
could define different page layouts (fairly) easily - I started with a
'poster' idea which is shown in the wiki page above - this is very similar
to maposmatic, but townguide will highlight points of interest for you and
include them in a key on the page.

The other page layout I always intended to develop was a booklet, which I
think is what you are asking for - This has not been developed too well, but
it works as a proof of concept at the moment - see the example at:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/a/ab/Townguide_book.pdf

The obvious things that need sorting are the map image resolution to make it
look nice on paper, and the size of the individual page map tiles.    I
produced this with the 'version 1' of townguide.  There is a version 2 in
preparation (very slowly) that includes more customisation options and
improved output resolution as a result of work done in last year's Google
Summer of Code - things like adding GPX traces over the map.   The code is
all at http://code.google.com/p/townguide I have a wiki page there which
provides installation instructions which should work for version 1 - there
are some more dependencies required for version 2.

I am afraid the demonstration web service that I used to have running is not
working at the moment - I switched it off when xapi became so unreliable,
and I have not re-built it after a little disk crash - it could easily be
set up again to work with the new jxapi service if people are interested in
it.

You are very welcome to develop it if you want - I am willing to help get it
up to a more 'production' quality - but struggle to spend too much time on
it, which is why development has been so slow.


Regards,


Graham.

On 8 June 2011 03:28, Samuel Mandell <shmandell at gmail.com> wrote:

> Jean-Guilhem,
> It sounds like there could be a lot of demand for the ability to generate
> these map booklets.
> *Thomas* - are there any updates on this effort from the MapOSMatic side
> of things?
>  I am working with a group of designers on the disaster prepardness
> project so we can definitely contribute design resources.
> -Samuel
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 3:08 AM, Jean-Guilhem Cailton <jgc at arkemie.com>wrote:
>
>>  Hi,
>>
>> After the recent flood in Haut-Richelieu, Québec, and the request to use
>> MapOSMatic in this context, it happens that I met Thomas, one of the
>> developers of MapOSMatic.
>>
>> When I had asked about this functionality of map booklet, he had told me
>> that they had started working on this (or on features that would make this
>> easier, I don't remember exactly) during the Hackfest last August.
>>
>> Maybe coordinating efforts on this would be the best way to move forward?
>>
>>
>> By the way, he also told me that he had sent an email reply, that
>> apparently was moderated on lists he is not a member of, and that I have not
>> seen. He explained that there was still a lag in the database updates (after
>> the MapOSMatic database had been down).
>> About the mapping of a specific area defined by a relation (not
>> necessarily a city), it might be not be too far from what is done with
>> administrative boundary ways, but would require a mean to transmit or
>> specify the desired area.
>>
>>
>> Anyway Samuel, I invite you to have a look at http://www.maposmatic.orgif you have not already (there seems to be a problem at the moment with a
>> job over Berlin, hopefully not for long).
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Jean-Guilhem
>>
>>
>> Le 07/06/2011 08:51, Samuel Mandell a écrit :
>>
>> Essentially what I'm looking for is the ability to produce a Thomas-Guide
>> style maps book where a city is broken into printable pages (e.g. A6) and at
>> the back would be an index of streets with corresponding page and x/y axis
>> information.
>>
>>  As mentioned before it would be ideal if this could be automated so that
>> all it would need is a city and it would produce the pages. Anybody
>> interested in helping create such a system?
>>
>>  -Samuel
>>
>>   On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Dane Springmeyer <dane at dbsgeo.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Samuel,
>>>
>>>  It seems to me like rendering the actual pages would be easier (than
>>> actually rendering a large image, then chopping). This should also give
>>> better results because the scales of things like text and lines would look
>>> better.
>>>
>>>  So, the way I would approach this would be to determine the size and
>>> extents of each map for each page (ideally automatically). Then render each
>>> one with Mapnik. So, your ingredients would be a width and height in pixels,
>>> and bounding box for each page. Then write a python script to loop over
>>> every page and render a map using an OSM stylesheet.
>>>
>>>  If you don't have python scripts skills then we can think of
>>> alternatives, but that would be my first recommendation. Mike Migurski, also
>>> author of safety maps, has done this with Mapnik for printed bike maps of
>>> SF, so he could likely advise.
>>>
>>>  On Jun 6, 2011, at 3:03 PM, Mikel Maron wrote:
>>>
>>>  Folks, what did we have in place to produce map books?
>>>
>>>
>>>  Making mapbooks easier to script, via python, with Mapnik has long been
>>> a goal of mine.
>>>
>>>  But I've not really gotten past proof of concept. One usecase is making
>>> a map of every "feature" in a dataset that meets some criteria. I wrote a
>>> script a while ago that demonstrates how to do that with mapnik by querying
>>> all countries over a given population and them rendering a map for each,
>>> while painting a special outline over their border. Code is here:
>>> http://mapnik-utils.googlecode.com/svn/example_code/map_sequences/ and
>>> an animated gif to demonstrate what is done is here:
>>>
>>>  http://dbsgeo.com/tmp/mapnik_animated.gif
>>>
>>>   Can Mapsomatic easily be modified for different formats/scales?
>>>
>>>
>>>  It can be done but I've found that hacking around in MapOsMatic
>>> requires a lot of patience and pretty high python/cairo skill level.
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.safety-maps.org/ was a recent project to do something
>>> similar. I know the developers would be interested to hear more ideas how to
>>> make it useful.
>>>
>>>
>>>  safety-maps are awesome.
>>>
>>>
>>> == Mikel Maron ==
>>> +14152835207 @mikel s:mikelmaron
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Forwarded Message ----
>>> *From:* Richard Weait <richard at weait.com>
>>> *To:* Samuel Mandell <shmandell at gmail.com>
>>> *Cc:* talk at openstreetmap.org
>>> *Sent:* Mon, June 6, 2011 4:16:08 PM
>>> *Subject:* Re: [OSM-talk] Disaster Preparedness Project
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 8:12 PM, Samuel Mandell <shmandell at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> > I'm designing a project whose goal is to prepare folks in my community
>>> for
>>> > disasters. An essential part of any disaster kit are maps of the local
>>> area
>>> > so that when electricity has gone out people can still navigate to
>>> specific
>>> > areas of the city (for instance to get supplies or medical help).
>>> > OpenStreetMap has comprehensive map data for my area (the San Francisco
>>> Bay
>>> > Area) and I'd like to use the mapping data to create maps for the
>>> various
>>> > cities to hand-out to residents. Since I'd need detailed (1:4800) of an
>>> > entire city I haven't been able to use the export tool since it seems
>>> to
>>> > have some built in limits to how large of an image it will generate
>>> (which
>>> > makes sense). For Mountain View, CA the image size we'd want to
>>> generate is
>>> > around 9409 x 11310 with a 1:4800 scale, in other words, very large. We
>>> > would then cut this into smaller squares and print it out in a booklet
>>> with
>>> > attribution to OpenStreetMap for the data and visuals.
>>> > What's the best way for us to generate these detailed maps of the
>>> various
>>> > cities?
>>>
>>> Well that sounds awesome.
>>>
>>> You might try downloading an extract of OSM data for that area.  You
>>> should be able to find an extract that deals with California, or the
>>> US West.  That way you don't have to deal with an entire planet full
>>> of data.  Then use Mapnik or one of the other rendering tools to
>>> generate your map.  You'll likely want to adjust the style sheet to
>>> make it just right for emergency awareness.
>>>
>>> There is a company in SF area experienced in printing high resolution
>>> maps from OSM data. Perhaps they'll do it for you for free since it is
>>> such a worthy project?
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>>
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-- 
Graham Jones
Hartlepool, UK.
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