[Mapit] More Info

[Bernhard Herzog]

"James Mullen" <jmullenllc at mindspring.com> writes:

> I've done some more reading of the source code.  Here's how I understand
> what's going on with Map It!
> 
> Genmap - creates an image file with embedded markers
> Showmap - creates the html page with an image map corresponding to the
> embedded markers in the image created by genmap.

Exactly.

> It appears from my last posting that MapIt! will work with Lat/lon data as
> long as it is used in decimal form.

It should work. All MapIt! currently really cares about is that the
coordinates used are orthogonal, that the tiles are aligned with the
coordinate axes and the x-coordinate increases to the right and the
y-axis increases upwards.

> So my question now is how do I define the images to use with Mapit?  Am I
> going to have to physically cut each chart into pieces and create an info
> file for each set?

That depends on what you start with. MapIt! comes with a script called
epscut which takes an eps file and uses ghostscript to render the tiles
for several zoom levels. It also generates the info files. We used it to
generate the Europe example tile set from a pdf file.
 
> Ultimately, I want to use mapit to do a batch create of the charts, i.e.
> generate all the web pages ahead of time.  What we'll have is a set of
> static html pages served from the web site.  If data is updated, then we
> regenerate the site.  I think this will improve performance overall and we
> don't have access to cgi from our web host.

That's pretty much the opposite of what MapIt! was designed for. MapIt!
is meant to be used for dynamic content and if you tried to do the same
with static content you'd need a huge amount of storage. That's not to
say that you couldn't do it with MapIt!, but you'd have to write your
own frontend and probably tweak the code in base/ as well.

For more specific advice we'd need to know more about your particular
application.

  Bernhard

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