Waldermar and Graham,
Seems like great thinking! I'm very excited about the collaboration
already and please keep on asking questions as they come up. Very
excited too to see the applications come together!
Cheers,
Dane
On Mar 29, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Graham Jones wrote:
Waldemar,
I like the idea of you collaborating as the two projects are very
closely related - one is the 'user' front end, while the other is
the processing part.
You do need to be careful that you are both working on different
projects, but collaborating, rather than working on a larger joint
one:
The GSoC FAQ says:
Can a group apply for and work on a single proposal?
No, only an individual may work on a given project. Of course,
students should feel free to collaborate with others to accomplish
their project goals.
My recommendation would be for you to get on with your Danjo front
end to allow the user to select different style sheets (or edit the
stylesheet) to do different mapnik rendering, add POIs etc. so that
you get something working fast.
Carlos can work on the better quality output for mapnik, and as long
as you know what his new options are going to look like, you can
bear these in mind when you produce your code.
If you find that you can not improve the output further without
improvements to Mapnik (as you state in your proposal), then you
could help with the mapnik bit at the end.
My concern is the mid term evaluations (that you need to pass to get
paid!). I can't remember what the questions are, but I think it is
about progress towards your project goals - if you concentrate on
mapnik first it will be difficult to argue progress towards your
goals?
Anyway, those are my suggestions, but you may want to read the GSoC
FAQ yourself to check if I am wrong!
I hope this helps!
Regards
Graham.
2010/3/29 waldemar quevedo <[email protected]>
Very interesting discussion indeed, thanks Carlos for your thourough
research. We were just discussing this late yesterday and already
sent and email this morning, thanks for that!
I have taken into consideration what was discussed and I think that
if we're both accepted we should tackle first mapnik's rendering
options, resolution and scale issues so that we do not become too
dependent at the end of the projects.
Maybe one way of decoupling the projects (specially mine, the web
front end project since mapnik is a huge dependency) would be to
make a third schedule for the proposal, one where we both specify
the way we are going are going to collaborate. This way we would
both work on having a solid proposal for each project without
depending too much on the other project. If one of us is not chosen
then we would carry on and work on the original schedule, and if
we're both selected we would work on the 3rd schedule (which would
only be sent to the maling list and mapnik/osm community not to
Google). What do you think?
Here is a draft of my current proposal for the OSM project, please
tell me your thoughts, I will update it later today: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2010/Student_Applications#Draft_application
:_Better_Print_Support:_OpenPaperMaps.3F
I would also like to point out Carlos and I go to the same school,
have some classes together and have been meeting all week to work on
this project. If we're both accepted we would have a similar working
flow so that we're both at the same page.
Thank you all for your suggestions and good luck at the Where2.0
conference!
- Waldemar
2010/3/29 Carlos Enrique López Garcés <[email protected]>
Good evening.
I just wanted to share the way I understand the project, so here's
an email I sent to Mr. Springmeyer. I'd appreciate any feedback you
could give me:
Good evening Mr. Springmeyer, how are you?
I'm sending you this email to see if you could answer me some
questions I have about the 'Better Print Support' and to let you
know about the picture I have of it. Since you are visiting Mike
Migurski and Tom Carden tomorrow, it would be great if you could
also share this email with them to make sure that these ideas and
questions make sense.
Talking to Waldemar and reading some resources in the OpenStreetMap
wiki, I found out that a major need this project has is the
capability to customize the way a map is printed in digital file
formats, such as PDF, Illustrator's and Inkcape's, so it can later
be printed to paper of various sizes. People find it hard to print a
map correctly because difficult extra steps are necessary, which
require the knowledge of other tools, and the results are sometimes
inaccurate. To mention examples of the former issue, Nicolas
Marichal says that lacking the capability of turning on/off specific
layers the resulting map files tend to be too large to be handled
properly (Waldemar showed me a PDF file generated with MapOSMatic
that was really large and that caused his PDF viewer to crash (I
hope this is what Nicolas Marichal was talking about)), containing
unnecessary elements the user may not want to see in her map. About
the latter issue, he mentions that some elements are sometimes
displayed in wrong positions ("water areas sometimes appear wrong,
as if the city is flooded"); I guess this is the result of resizing
or scaling the map.
To overcome these problems, you suggest that OSM's "Easy Printable
Maps" project should be based upon the work done in the "Better
Print Support" project, which will address some of the issues
mentioned above. The existence of tickets #343, #320, #389 and #358
is a sign that the intention of improving Mapnik in these areas has
existed for quite a long time now. Reading the description of these
tickets, I realize that they are indeed related to what Graham Jones
identifies as the main concerns of these two projects, namely
'resolution', 'rendering options' and 'scale'. I'll comment on these
tickets next (please, tell me if any of the ideas I've mentioned so
far are wrong):
Ticket #343 (Add a resolution parameter to Map object): The goal
here would be to be possible for the user to specify the resolution
at which the map should be printed in the digital file (pdf, ai,
inkscape, etc.), expressed as a scaling factor that would manipulate
the size of symbols, fonts, lines, etc. The scaling should be done
in such a way that the spatial relationships between elements is
preserved (to prevent lakes from moving, for example). My question
here would be if the capability of specifying a custom resolution
parameter is what you refer to as 'multi-resolution'.
Ticket #389 (Add optional but explicit units everywhere): As I
understand, Mapnik currently uses PPIs as the unit for specifying
the resolution of the map, but it is desirable that other
measurement units, like mm, cm and microns, be used as well (I'm not
completely sure about this, though). As the title of this ticket
states, it should be possible to specify everything that's
measurable inside the map using various units (Robert Coup mentions
in his reply to my latest message in the mailing list that longitude
and latitude lines should also be displayed using units other than
degrees, like meters). Finally, the default unit should be pixels.
Ticket #320 (SVG-Based Symbolizers): I don't have enough information
to comment here, but Mr. Pavlenko said he is interested in an SVG
renderer.
Ticket #358 (Implementation of map borders and coordinate grids
similar to those provided by GMT): The features discussed in this
ticket are those that Robert Coup suggested (in his reply to my
message in the mailing list) and that are already implemented in the
experimental-pdf branch, but using WXPDFDOC. The idea here is to
provide these features with a Cairo-based renderer.
My questions for Mr. Migurski and Mr. Carden would be:
#1 I don't fully understand what they mean with "use the same
renderer for web cartography as multi-resolution cartography". I
interpret the sentence as providing support for producing maps with
different resolutions within the same renderer (Cairo-based
preferably).
#2 Does my vision of the project agree with theirs?
I'll post the contents of this email in the mailing list too. Maybe
other members might want to add their comments.
Thanks in advance.
Carlos Enrique López Garcés
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--
Dr. Graham Jones
Hartlepool, UK
email: [email protected]
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