Hey folks, Lots of good discussion going on around this proposed library.
>From the sounds of it there are many different camps of thinking on this subject which is great. Of course there are many approaches that can be used. Perhaps we might want to talk a little more about the high end user needs and work backwards. For instance if the end user does not want PDF's or has other requirements then symatical debate on the best PDF engine may not be required right now. There is an "end User Needs" section http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Cartographic_Library#End_User_Needs where PDF is only one required output. For starters I think bringing the FOSS4G world into the world of "cartographic product" production would be a huge jump. Whether is be digital-digital or digital-paper. Being able to do this using many applications and some custom API I think would keep flexibility open. So if many libraries can be included, lets include them. We'll all have different user requirements. Of course staying standards based where possible would be ideal so using context documents or SLD or something simmilar as an optional output would increase up take. As a final user product I would love to see something that ties easy drag/drop, point and click interactive design interface with real time screen refresh that could produce something akin to a Generic Maptool Tools (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/) script to produce a preview before I print it. Of course having options to use java and python to script workflows would suite the needs of power users who balk at GUI's. I know that the seprate projects will be responsible for the GUI. If we work backwards from the functionality of the GUI though I think we can find the pieces we need. Infact producing a full cartographic map layout in SCRIBUS or using it's technology might be the best way to not reinvent the wheel for the end user. Has anyone thught out the Pseudo code for the process? Posted on wiki http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Cartographic_Library#Worflow * read geo data * geometries * projection * metadata (if required) * apply styling * feature to style coding * Cartographic edits * overide some of the geometry if required (eg roads don't run through lakes) * manual edits / retouching * Produce other cartographic edits objects * create suround * create grids * create legend * create scale bar * create north arrow * Copyright notices from text file or DB * Licensing notices from text fiel or DB * Other * Output size La la la I'll post this to the wiki, maybe flushing this step out will allow us to match a library(ies) to a task(s). Hopefully we don't get hung up too much on choosing a narrow selection of libraries and keep the carto library itself quite open and flexible. Just some thoughts. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
