Rendercontrol

Rendering Waddington

Rendercontrol is a Perl/TK graphical user interface to Osmarender

Running the program

http://svn.openstreetmap.org/utils/rendercontrol/rendercontrol.pl

You will need:

Perl itself
perl-tk
LWP (for downloading files from the web)
Some command-line programs listed below, to do the actual work (inkscape, xmlstarlet, imagemagick)

Usage

Run the program

perl rendercontrol.pl

Initialisation stage

The program will ask a series of questions, and use your answers to create a configuration file. You can just press Enter instead of answering, then edit the config file later if you prefer.

whether it has permission to connect to the net (at the moment, it will exit if you don't type Y, yes, or similar)
OpenStreetMap username and password (used to download OSM data)
Location of certain files (it will look for these in some common locations, or ask you for a filename if it can't find them)
- Inkscape
- XmlStarlet
- ImageMagick
- JOSM bookmarks file

Once questions are answered, it will download the latest copy of osmarender from the OpenStreetMap SVN site

Basic usage

Use the File/Bookmarks menu to select a location (by default this is downloaded from OJW/Bookmarks, but you can copy your JOSM bookmark file here).
Alternatively, type the coordinates into edit boxes (S,N,W,E in degrees)

Press download button. If you have a valid OSM password, it will download the area and store it as data.osm

Press render button. If you have xmlstarlet, inkscape, and ImageMagick installed, it will
- render data.osm into output.svg
- rasterise output.svg into output.png
- convert output.png into output.jpg and output.gif (GIF format is required for the TK image control)
- display the rendered output.gif in the main window

Projects

Save project creates a sub directory and stores all your working files (data.osm output.svg, etc.) in there
Load project copies a set of files from a project directory into the working area

That means you can work on renders of several areas without having to download new data each time.

Other features

View menu lets you look at the various files in use
- OSM data - displays raw OSM XML data
- Osmarender - displays osmarender source code
- SVG - displays SVG source code of the rendered map
- Image - displays the output image

Update menu
- Download from web downloads the latest version of osmarender
- Reload options reloads the rendercontrol's options file

Future work

GUI improvements
Graphical editor for rendering rules (e.g. road colours, visibility) - that's when the TODO buttons in the screenshot will become style editor widgets
Support for more types of tools (e.g. other XSLT tools, other SVG renderers, other OSM rendering tools)
Ability to edit the various textfiles from within the GUI (like an OSM IDE)
More TLA's in the OSM XML GUI IDE SVN documentation ;)

Other ideas

How about making a "render this area" menu in JOSM?

Can we make the shared bookmarks file better (e.g. organise it by area, add everyone else's JOSM bookmarks)

Links

OJW/Bookmarks - example bookmarks file
- Feel free to add proper bookmarks to this page
- Put this page on your watchlist, as changes to it will affect anyone who uses rendercontrol
Revision history
Programs