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 Administrative / General / 10867
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Subject: 
Re: New World LUG Map demo
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Fri, 28 Mar 2003 05:00:33 GMT
Viewed: 
193 times
  
Many years ago (maybe 1986) I wrote some of the simple projection routines for
a little mapping project.. I think it was some sort of independent study.

While I was unaware of the Free BSD and linux issues, I wasn't intending to
propose ArcView due to the issue of access to it of course.  It is a bit on the
pricey side these days too, in the event you don't have ready access to use it.
I was mentioning it mainly because 1) you mentioned the different projection
idea and ArcView handles that well.  2) With SVGMapper it generates the SVG for
you but in a way that uses XML and javascript to leave it wide open to
customization.  I thought if you were familiar with that (svgmapper) you might
glean more ideas. 3) It even has routines built in (svgmapper) for generalizing
features. [arcview does too].

If you were willing to make the base maps fairly static you would have your
code handle all the other stuff, sort of post-process on the svg files.

If you look at that sample page I posted there is a 'map tips' thing down in
the lower right  It doesn't work well with overlapping symbols though.

If it would be helpful I could send you these files and you could see how these
guys approach it.  Just a thought.  Not intending to side track you or anything.

I think it's pretty zoomy.


In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
In lugnet.admin.general, Ken Koleda writes:
A few questions and comments.
- What is your source for the country polygons?

A public domain ESRI .e00 file from GRID or NOAA, I forget which.

- You are coding all the map generation?  You have your own code writing
the SVG?

ya

I have been recently working with a program called SVGMapper.  Well, it's
an extension really.. an extension to ArcView from ESRI.
Here is a test sample:
http://rougeriver.com/svgmaps/cso_comp/map.htm
While this doesn't look much like what you have, it may give you some ideas.

I realize how popular ArcView is, but I avoided it because I need things to
run on Linux and FreeBSD (and also because of licensing issues, since it's
a commercial product).  I also needed low-level ASCII representations of the
polygons if I was to have any hope of understanding and customizing what was
going on.  So I searched and searched and eventually found a public domain
dataset in a format that I was able to transmogrify into something usable for
my purposes.

Also, the program that generates the SVG has an option, which I've used,
to compress the files.  It uses (freeware?) called gzip.  One hassle is
that the .SVGs are no longer readable text.  But, with my data sets the
files go down by about 2/3rds in size.  Helpful for folks on dialups.

Ya I'm piping all the SVG data through gzip -9 and writing out .svgz files
to the SVG output cache and seeing about 5.7x compression on average.

- Some where on there you should have the instructions on how to zoom, pan
etc,

Good idea...although before encouraging zooming in, there probably needs to
be a way to force an overly detailed map (with the default being as it is
currently, which is to include _just enough_ detail for the intended view).
Right now, if you zoom way in on a full-world image, you'll see really low-
resolution polygons, whereas if you generating a map that's specially zoomed
in from the start, it uses higher resolution data.  This is simply to reduce
bandwidth as much as possible.  The full world view at full resolution is
more than a megabyte even after gzip compression, making it unsuitable for
a general entry page.

"zoom = control+left mouse" for example

I'd hate to Mac OS X users to Ctrl-click or Windows users to press Command-
click.  Maybe it could guess what hardware they're running on from the user-
agent string their browser sends.  :)

--Todd



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: New World LUG Map demo
 
(...) A public domain ESRI .e00 file from GRID or NOAA, I forget which. (...) ya (...) I realize how popular ArcView is, but I avoided it because I need things to run on Linux and FreeBSD (and also because of licensing issues, since it's a (...) (22 years ago, 28-Mar-03, to lugnet.admin.general)

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