(Not specifically OG question but people here have interests in this direction)
I want to make a leaflet for an event and include a map. Most of the ways usually done for this are not strictly legal. I could just use the (non) defence of everyone does it but I would rather not.
I have noticed that OpenStreetMap has coverage of the area of Central London I am interested in. The simple way to make my map would be to screen scrape the browser window as a bitmap. Is there any better way, eg extracting an SVG file of a particular area.
I also want to add some annotations - eg route you get from tube to the venue. Frustratingly it is dead easy to do this online using Googlemaps. But this doesn't help legally for a printed or emailed leaflet.
Any thoughts
On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 05:52:48AM +0100, Andrew Black - lists wrote:
(Not specifically OG question but people here have interests in this direction)
I want to make a leaflet for an event and include a map. Most of the ways usually done for this are not strictly legal. I could just use the (non) defence of everyone does it but I would rather not.
I have noticed that OpenStreetMap has coverage of the area of Central London I am interested in. The simple way to make my map would be to screen scrape the browser window as a bitmap. Is there any better way, eg extracting an SVG file of a particular area.
I also want to add some annotations - eg route you get from tube to the venue. Frustratingly it is dead easy to do this online using Googlemaps. But this doesn't help legally for a printed or emailed leaflet.
There are two main methods used for rendering OSM data: OSMarender, which uses XSLT to transform the OSM XML data to SVG (which can then easily be rendered using a variety of methods) and mapnik, which uses Postgis (so requires a postgres database server).
For a small area, I'd probably find osmarender easier. I haven't used it for a while, but http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Osmarender/Howto looks to be fairly informative.
As far as adding annotations, depending on what sort of thing you want to add it may be easiest to do so by hand with a vector graphics package (in the SVG file you get from osmarender). Alternatively, check out JOSM http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/JOSM. This is an OSM editing application - you should be able to download a bounding box using it, and then add your local annotations (as long as they're map-like ones - I'm not sure how you'd draw a route on, for example) and then not upload your changes, but save to a file instead.
If you want to get into editing with JOSM, you'll find http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_features helpful as a hint as to what sort of features the renderers are likely to support.
Hope that helps - let us know if you get something working!
Cheers,
Dominic.
Dom Thanks for the reply - I now know where to look. Will give it a go when I have a rainy day :-)
Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
As far as adding annotations, depending on what sort of thing you want to add it may be easiest to do so by hand with a vector graphics package (in the SVG file you get from osmarender).
What I had in mind is editing the SVG file using (say) Inkscape. If my extras were placed in a different layer then I could replace the map part should I need to.
On Sun, Sep 02, 2007 at 10:44:54AM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 05:52:48AM +0100, Andrew Black - lists wrote:
I want to make a leaflet for an event and include a map. [...]
There are two main methods used for rendering OSM data: OSMarender, which uses XSLT to transform the OSM XML data to SVG (which can then easily be rendered using a variety of methods) and mapnik, which uses Postgis (so requires a postgres database server).
These have both been aimed at producing maps for onscreen display - they probably print OK, but there's a couple of much smaller projects designed to produce formats perhaps a little more suited to print.
OSMPS converts .osm files (which can be saved from JOSM, the editor Dom mentioned) to postscript (and then to PDF/etc) http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/osmps I've played with this, and it certainly works, but it's not too flexible.
Secondly, there's osm2ai which creates Adobe Illustrator files http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Exporting_to_Adobe_Illustrator I've not played with this because it would require setting up a mysql database replicating the main OSM one, which I've not had time for so far - but there are HOWTOs on doing this.
s
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Andrew Black - lists -
Dominic Hargreaves -
Stephen Gower