[mkgmap-dev] Text format for TYP files

Thu Jan 14 22:07:05 GMT 2010

This may be slightly off-topic, I think that it could be useful to have
a repository of TYP files and associated style definitions.  For example,
a TYP file would be necessary to define a custom line style for displaying
bus route information on a separate map layer.

It seems that http://cypherman1.googlepages.com/genTYP is the "de facto"
text format of TYP files.  According to the home page, the latest release
was about 3 years ago.

The web based TYP file editor at http://ati.land.cz/gps/typdecomp/
is more recent, but its text output does not seem to be able to export
all the definitions that the editor is able to create.  Some of the
source code is available, but there are very few comments (some in Chech)
and no example of usage.  I was not enough of a Perl expert to figure out
how to input the binary TYP data for decompilation.  For what it is worth,
I tried the following, but my call signature of the as_string method is
obviously wrong.

#!/usr/bin/perl
require "source.cgi";
undef $/; $_=<>; print Garmin::TYP::as_string($_);

I wonder if there are any other tools that make use of the genTYP format.
A textual format like genTYP's (with XPM graphics) would be ideal for a
TYP file repository.  It would be easy to change parameters
(such as Family ID) and copy definitions between TYP files with any
text editor.

Any thoughts?  Would it be worthwhile to reimplement the genTYP txt/TYP
encoder/decoder in Java?  It should not be too hard, given that an XPM
library already exists at <http://www.bolthole.com/java/Xpm.html>.

	Marko