Mkgmap/dev
From OpenStreetMap
Page about the development of mkgmap.
Contents |
What is next?
The version 451 (12 Dec) now has the following enhancements:
- You can combine several .img files into a gmapsupp.img file. (you don't have to create the gmapsupp.img at the same time that you create the .img files as you had to do before).
- To get the tdb file and the overview map use the new --tdbfile option. Like with the gmapsupp option this now works on .img files directly and you don't have to do this at the same time as making the .img files.
- Works in MapSource, large files would crash MapSource previously.
Subversion access
The following command will check out the main development branch of mkgmap.
svn co http://svn.parabola.me.uk/mkgmap/trunk mkgmap
Branches are created temporarily to perform larger pieces of work and appear in the conventional place in directories under branches.
Nightly development builds
The code from subversion is automatically built every day (as long as there have been changes). Click on the link below to see what is available.
You can always get the latest version from mkgmap-latest.tar.gz. Development versions haven't had a lot of testing but they probably work and will usually have more features than the current stable version.
List of things to do
If you want to get involved in the development, then here are a few ideas for things that need doing.
Language improvements
This is an continuing effort. The characters that can actually be displayed depends on the particular GPS device. Therefore if you want a map that can be used by the largest number of people, we need to produce names that are in upper case ascii, but also allow the flexibility to make maps with other character sets for national maps.
So we need people to check character set rendering on their devices and to provide transliterations from character sets to ascii (or other character sets, the flexibility is there to do that). There is a internationalisation page for this with more information.
Sea areas
It would be great to have polygons for sea areas, rather than just the coast line as at present. I don't know the best approach here, looking at the other renderers would be a good idea. They all seem to involve other sources of data or pre-processing and we might have to do the same. As an extra complication, polygons will not display if they have more than around 250 points.
GUI
As mkgmap gets more sophisticated and gains more options the usefulness of a GUI increases for many people. I made a start on the gui branch, but it would benefit from someone who is more adept at writing GUI code helping out there.
Installation and scripts to run
Installation and shell scripts / batch files to run the program would be very useful.
