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
  • Osmarender
  • wikipedia:Perl
  • wikipedia:Tk_(computing)
  • wikipedia:ImageMagick
  • wikipedia:XmlStarlet
  • wikipedia:XSLT
  • wikipedia:Inkscape
  • wikipedia:rsvg
  • wikipedia:LWP
  • REST