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Published by breki on 21 Nov 2010

Fresh Catch For November 21st

These are my new delicious links for November 21st:

Published by breki on 20 Nov 2010

Yes, it’s finally here! After more than a month of hard work and a lot of code changes, I managed to produce a new stable release (well I hope it’s stable). Just to be on the safe side I did not publish the package to the main download directory so your old Maperitive installations will not detect the new version. This means you’ll need to download it manually from the beta location. So if anyone wants to have a go, please do and report any problems.

The new version has a lot of infrastructure code changes. The biggest change is that I’ve replaced Windsor Castle with my own newly implemented Dependency Injection library. This probably not very interesting to end users, so I’ll write more about it in other posts.

As for functionality, there are a lot of improvements:

improved performance (I’ve done performance profiling using dotTrace)
fixed Illustrator SVG problems
XAPI URL is now configurable
you can now specify lflp.max-allowed-corner-angle and lflp.min-buffer-space settings which control how line labeling works (see the default rules)
tile generator: new min-tile-file-size parameter which allows skipping of generating empty tiles
better error description of invalid OSM files
more forgiving OSM reader
Maperitive should now not fail if it cannot write settings
export commands now export to ‘output’ directory by default.

Enjoy!

Maperitive,OpenStreetMap

Published by breki on 19 Nov 2010

Maperitive vs. Adobe Illustrator

It’s been a hard fight, but I’ve finally worked out most (all?) of Adobe Illustrator’s quirks and bugs in SVG importing and ways to go around them. I can now officially say that Adobe’s support for SVG is lousy (so much for their professed commitment to open standards). I even managed to export SVGs from Illustrator which then could not be imported back into it (“Can’t open the illustration”).

Anyway, SVGs now look pretty nice in Illustrator, but there is a price to pay: they need to generated in a different way than for Inkscape, so there is a new setting available in the export-svg command. They certainly look better than SVGs produced by the Export tab on the OSM.org’s map site and they are structured in a more usable way (better layering and reuse of shapes, use of actual text lettering instead of graphic paths etc).

Here’s a sample SVG map of the Dublin’s center, so you can take a look (warning 1: do not try to open the file in a browser, it is a compressed SVG (SVGZ) file which only Illustrator and Inkscape know how to handle, warning 2: although the map file is not very large, it may take a while for Illustrator to open and show it).

Expect this feature to be available in the next Maperitive release (within days).

Cartography,Maperitive,OpenStreetMap