[mkgmap-dev] [PATCH v1] - Add support for marine (aka extended) types

Wed Aug 12 12:48:52 BST 2009

Hi Clinton,

> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Mark Burton<markb at ordern.com> wrote:
> >
> > Ahoy there shipmates,
> >
> > This patch is a first stab at providing support for the 3-byte extended
> > types that are used on marine maps.
> 
> I tested this, and found that it works fine, both on my eTrex and in
> Roadtrip for Mac OS X.

Excellent.

> FYI, I did not have to switch to marine mode or anything else to get
> the symbols to display. (Although some of  the symbols didn't look
> that nice, but I assume they're there for utility and not aesthetics.)
> So far, I have just tried this with a few types: a lateral buoy symbol
> and a pier line type.

On my eTrex, you can choose between various marine icon sets (Garmin,
NOAA, International) and there is also an option to have "marine
colors". 

> It would probably be nice to get this committed, so more people can
> experiment with the additional possibilities this can offer.

As it's fairly unlikely to break maps that don't use any extended types
it's probably safe to commit.

> > At this time, the various extra attributes that can be assigned to the
> > marine entities (depth, colour, light colour/flash, etc.) are not
> > handled but I have made some progress in understanding their encoding
> > so at least some of these could be supported in the future. Obviously,
> > the OSM data would need to be enriched to specify the required
> > attributes.
> 
> There appears to be significant progress in adding this type of data
> to OSM. Since the proposed tags attempt to conform to international
> standards, it should be fairly easy to match these to Garmin types:
> 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/marine-tagging

The author of the OpenSeaMap effort says that there are now two
proposed schemes for tagging marine entities. As far as mkgmap is
concerned it doesn't really make much difference what the tags are but
it would be nice if there was just one tag set to transform rather than
2.

However, I do intend to continue work on this soon.

Cheers,

Mark