[mkgmap-dev] Re: mkgmap Contours

Mon Jul 6 22:50:03 BST 2009

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 8:12 PM, Christian
Gawron<christian.gawron at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Stuart Poulton schrieb:
>>
>> Christian,
>>
>> Many thanks.
>>
>> A feature request, for those wanting to simply produce contour tiles,
>> would it be possible to use the areas.list file from splitter to define the
>> bounding boxes ?
>
> Sounds like a good idea!
> Right now, you can use --dem-separate-img and the template.args to generate
> separate contour tiles.

Thanks for your work, it's great that mkgmap is getting this feature.
I've only read the recent threads here and haven't tried running it so
maybe it does some of these already, but it would be great if you
could:

* Specify a --dem-bbox --dem-area=area.list as Stuart said so that you
don't need an existing .img to clip it.
* Export to .osm instead of .img. This would allow for replacing
srtm2osm & rendering with mapnik, and perhaps it's better to generate
contours in two steps in some cases.
* Support for..
** DEM 3 data from viewfinderpanoramas:
http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html
** SRTM 30+ (This is SRTM + GTOPO30):
http://topex.ucsd.edu/WWW_html/srtm30_plus.html
** GTOPO30: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTOPO30

The DEM 3 data is non-free but I've been using it privately on my GPS.
I'm using files someone else generated though with proprietary tools
though so I can't generate them myself. It would be great to have a
free utility for processing them.

SRTM 30+ is the best free global DEM available, at least until we
figure out if ASTER is free or not (see my correspondence with NASA on
talk@ for updates on that).

And GTOPO30+ is wildly inaccurate but better than nothing. But as with
DEM 3 I couldn't find any free utility to convert it.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTOPO30