The mkgmap blog

The mkgmap program converts map data from Open Street Map into the Garmin img map format that can be loaded onto Garmin GPS devices. For more information see the OSM mkgmap wiki page or the mkgmap home page.

Today is the two year anniversary of the public announcement of mkgmap.

It is interesting to look back and recall that the project started less than a month before that announcement. The map was basic and only included roads and only at one zoom level, but it was still useful for mapping. I never imagined at that time, that two years later improvements would still be being made and there would be a separate web site and everything.

The big news of the year is that routing support has now been added. This came about by the efforts of Robert Vollmert and Alexander Atanasov. Alex had working code to read files that is used in Navit. Although the first work was done right at the beginning of the year, there was a lengthy break during the summer when little was done. It then really took off when Robert returned to the project in December and rapidly coded up all of the remaining pieces. In a mere couple of weeks it took shape and bugs were removed, resulting in something that looks very good indeed.

The other major improvement is with the style system to convert between OSM tags and the features on the map. This can now use conditions based on several tags. It should be possible to create special purpose maps, such as the cycle map directly from a mkgmap style. At the current time there is a noname style, that highlights residential streets that do not have a name so that they can be investigated by mappers.

What next?

These are my thoughts, but who knows development could take off on a completely different direction when the time comes...

1. Currently routing is only available when things are first converted to the Polish format. It will be a priority to make that work directly with OSM files.
2. Next up there is the overview map situation. Currently the overview map does not contain anything but the required definition areas. We need to get back to having it contain major roads and coastline etc. as it used to before it was dropped when the ability to stitch together previously generated .img files was added.
3. I hope there will be a variety of new styles added for different purposes.
4. It would be nice to have proper ocean areas, rather than just coastline as at present.
5. Perhaps 2009 will be the year that mkgmap gets a built in GUI, you never know.

There is also the issue of splitting up large OSM files into tiles that are suitable for generating the maps. I shall be releasing a program to do this in a way that is designed for the purpose and requirements of mkgmap, including variable sized areas depending on map density and exact cutting and matching of tiles.

There has been a good response to the request to try out routing and lots of good feedback on the problems encountered.

Robert has made a large number of fixes over the last few days and so I have put up an updated ready-built distribution on the web-site.

Updated links fixed

• Download as zip mkgmap-route-r806.zip
• Or, download as tar mkgmap-route-r806.zip

I think this version is noticeably better than the previous one in many ways - give it a go!

Please help test out routing support in mkgmap by downloading one of the distributions below and testing it out.

There are several known issues and routing support should be considered experimental at the moment, but we would like to get some early feedback.

In particular you need to be aware of the following issues:

• Only works with Polish format input files at the moment. Therefore you should get osm2mp to convert from .osm to .mp
• May not work well in MapSource, but if you have any success let us know, including the version number.

Updated 10 Dec

• Download as zip mkgmap-route-r806.zip
• Or, download as tar mkgmap-route-r806.zip

Please give feedback to the mailing list at: mkgmap-dev (at) lists.mkgmap.org.uk or on the wiki on the routing talk page.

For further information see the mkgmap routing page.

I've had word from Hanno Böck that there is a gentoo package for mkgmap. It's in the official gentoo tree, so it's just a matter of doing the following:

 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge mkgmap

The link to the package page for mkgmap.

There are a number of other useful map related packages such as JOSM and mapnik that are used by OSM on the geosciences page too.

The subversion repository for mkgmap has been upgraded to 1.5 and at the same time it was moved to a different machine. You don't have to do anything and everything should look the same as it was, but I'm letting you all know just in case I've forgotten to set something up properly.

If you see that the latest version is 665 or above then you are seeing the new server.