[mkgmap-dev] Short mkgmap HowTo

Tue Aug 2 21:02:28 BST 2011

Steve,

>>>> This should IMHO be the overall goal of the whole mkgmap project.
>>> Agreed!
>> NOT AGREED. At least not completely!
>>
>> You should take into consideration the user's necessity to visually
>> select tile subsets for an interesting region....
>
> You are right, Peter.
> However, it is also true that these goals are independent of each other,
> and to some extent what you describe is a goal to be achieved by the
> splitter tools, not mkgmap itself.

The needed parts for the gmapsupp.img are determined *after* the
users manual tile selection. The selected tiles define what goes in the 
GPS device index. So the "goals" can't be independent.

> It would indeed be good to launch a project to write what you, Peter,
> have described.
> ( There is a superb GTK widget called "osm-gps-map" which provides a
> scrollable OSM map in a panel ready for you to use to write a custom GUI
> application to do pretty much anything. )

Fine, no problem with that. But the problem is that you loose 
functionality and flexibility.

Workflow I:
  (1) create small tiles with local index information;
      it doesn't matter how they are split, assumed they are "small"
  (2) user can manually select tiles for specific region
  (3) Mapsources combines all tiles index information
      into a global MDR17 index for use on a GPS device

Workflow II:
  (1) let user define region of interest via JOSM download (limited size)
      or rely on available datasources (geofabrik, limited choice)
  (2) split, use mkgmap and upload to GPS device with
      global MDR17 index all in one step

In either workflow you need to know the secrets of the MDR17.
In workflow II you loose functionality.

If it's an *option* in mkgmap to create a global index, MDR17, ...
I have no problem with that.

But it shouldn't be the "overall goal of the whole mkgmap project". 
Currently we have Mapsource .... IMHO there are some other OSM/mkgmap 
issues to solve first ...

That's the reasoning for my "not completely agreed" to the above 
mentioned definition of an overall project goal.

Peter