[Freegis-list] Thuban-Map-SVG

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Sun, May 23, 2004 at 08:44:56AM +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote:
> As end users, we are trying to set up a complete GIS system, based on free 
> software only. 

> One issue that remains, I believe, is easy map printing (ArcView style). 
> As I see it, several solutions are possible, 
> but all suffer from one or more limitations:

It is true that printed map production is not easy and powerful enough yet.
At Intevation we also came to that conclusion and 
already explored a couple of other options.

My current vision of this is something that what I call "Thuban-MAP-SVG".

The design idea is that for the final touch of any map,
you will need a very powerful page-layout/vector drawing application.
Those applications exist, but usually do not know much about maps.

So the idea is to make an interactive geoviewer play nicely
together with a genral vector drawing applications.
With proprietary software the chances for this to happens
is low, because each vendor always has the tendency to try
to add more feature to his proprietary product to increase sales.
With Free Software on the other hand it is possible to modify both
applications and sell a combined solution.

So we had a Diplom-Thetis by Markus Rechtien written here at Intevation 
which implemented this prototype model for Thuban and Skencil (0.7.x).
Now Thuban (CVS version) can export a Thuban-Map-SVG, which 
is fully compliant SVG, but contains more information which 
Skencil will need to handle the included layers and labels nicely.
As Skencil is among the most stable, scriptable and powerful Free Software 
vector drawing applications, you can then make nice maps.
It is just a prototype of and we would welcome more help 
with Skencil and Thuban, as well as more implementation of the
Thuban-MAP-SVG. I believe that it has the possibility to beat
the proprietary solutions for printing queues, because it 
decouples the tasks of map composing and map printing layout.

Another usuable predecessor of that Thuban-Skencil(0.7.) solution 
is the Skencil Geo-Plugin, it will let you place several Shapefile
layers on top of each other.

Note that Thuban also has a standable vector printing support
which is sufficient for many cases.

	Bernhard
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