Cartography Team

This page was created to join forces for tasks that provide special skills:

Skills

Additional to general knowledge of geocordinates, any specific skills in handling the different geotools are of great benefit: Perl/Php4 coders are welcome as well as advanced users of xplanet, geosphere, KDE marble or even googleearth.

Joining this team shows that you are ready to help out with specific Debian related issues that are connected to the skills described above. Please, just write down your WikiName. If you wish to introduce yourself, you can use your HomePage.

Members

• RalfGesellensetter

• ...

Currently, we create new maps whenever new schools pop up. This implies running some perl scripts on maintainer and rendering images by means of xplanet 0.9 from woody! An impression of our results can be seen at:

http://www.skolelinux.no/slschools/cartography.html

There are plans to move on to xplaner 1.x or even use different tools like KDE Marble, Earth3D/GoogleEarth, Geosphere or plain PHP+gd.

Current Tasks

• Migrating from xplanet 0.9 to 1.x or any other alternative

  • old style:  xplanet -night_image void -shade 100 -blend -radius 350 -latitude 62.2 -longitude 18.3 -markers -markerfile xplanet-markers.txt -image earthmap_hires.jpg -output skolelinux-scandinavia.png

  • new style:  xplanet -radius 350 -latitude 62.2 -longitude 18.3 -config xplanet.conf -num_times 1 -output skolelinux-scandinavia.png

    • This call uses a local config file xplanet.conf that states the location of placemarks and the usage of a locally stored hires map that is also used for the dark side of the globe to avoid any darkness on our map: {{{[earth]

"Earth" shade=80 map=earthmap_hires.jpg night_map=earthmap_hires.jpg marker_file=xplanet-markers.txt }}}

• http://user.skolelinux.no/~ralfg/slschools/map/test.jpg Further options can be found in /usr/share/xplanet/config/default, test in local window like this:

   xplanet -radius 300 -latitude 62.2 -longitude 18.3 -config xplanet.conf -timewarp 7200 -window -verbosity 4 -label -wait 1   The wait option could be a way to re-render the map once a day using a background process.

• Export coordinates to [http://earth.google.com/kml/kml_tut.html KML file]

• Maintain/update school coordinates
• (Re-)Draw maps

Milestones

• Committed revision of make_map.pl that works with xplanet 1.x from Sarge. In the same turn, we switch from png to jpeg format, saving more than 50 percent of space.

  • ToDo: Make sure that all references to png files get adapted; remove png from svn.

Notes

• Geosphere: The project didn't develop much further since 2004. It's under BSD license, by the way. Rendering surface textures seems out of question.

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