On Dec 21, 2007 7:32 AM, Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > > Interesting idea. I know mapcenter is not sufficient for a huge > > project such as this, but it's good for free testing. My thinking is > > in line with yours--I was thinking at some point OSM might acquire a > > full license (note that the author has a reduced license cost for > > charities--maybe OSM or OSMF might qualify?). I'm not sure I'm the guy > > to be responsible for running it (I've already got a lot going on), > > but I'm certainly willing to help set it up. > > Would it not be worthwile to try and fix our (free) software to be > able to do what cGPSMapper does, instead of buying (and relying on) > non-free software that is developed by one person alone and might > vanish any day without anybody having the source? > > I don't know how compilicated that is but I'm sure the cGPSMapper > author is no magician so we should be able to accomplish what he has, > and make the world less dependent on proprietary software while doing > so...? > > Bye > Frederik
Frederik, yes, that would be the ideal case. It's a matter of reverse engineering. From what I can tell, the mkgmap project was made possible by the work done here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/garmin-img/ Unfortunately I don't have the time to give this my dedicated focus that reverse engineering requires. However, it's not the worst thing to use this proprietary software. The so-called "Polish format" has sort of become the de-facto standard for custom maps and there are a number of graphical editor tools which support the format (GPSMapEdit, Global Mapper, etc.). GPSMapEdit even has the ability to test your routing before you send it through cGPSMapper. That's what I did to verify that my XSL was working correctly. If someone wants to focus on reverse engineering the routeable bits of the IMG format, that would be awesome. It's independent of the work I'm planning to do, though. If someone figures out the format, I'd just switch the output to write to that binary format instead of text. Note that there's a new compressed Garmin map format called NT, and I'm guessing eventually new receivers will only support that. To my knowledge it has not been reverse engineered at all. Karl _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
