[mkgmap-dev] Short mkgmap HowTo

Mon Aug 1 22:09:52 BST 2011

Wanmil,

>> This should IMHO be the overall goal of the whole mkgmap project.
> Agreed!

NOT AGREED. At least not completely!

You should take into consideration the user's necessity to visually 
select tile subsets for an interesting region. You would also have to 
clone and engineer the visual tile selection facility of Mapsource if 
you go GPS only with mkgmap.

No GPS device in the foreseeable future will have so much memory that 
you can have the complete OSM Europe/World/.. map on a SDHC card. Not to 
mention the transfer times and handling difficulties for tons of *.img 
data ...

I also think that Osmosis and the other existing splitting tools are no 
choice from the standpoint of usability today ... you're lacking the 
visual user interface to select an area of suitable tiles in an 
intuitive way.

You can see on the OSM AiO download area where the gmapsupp approach 
leeds to. It workes as long as continents fit on a 4GB card ...

ftp://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/misc/openstreetmap/download.openstreetmap.de/aio/regions-europe/

Downloads for "Aachen, Wien, Alpen, Alsace, EU4G, CH-D-F, ..."
Where should it end? And more important: what is missing??

> The main work is to get the toolchain running:
> 1. Create a map with 2 small tiles using splitter and mkgmap
> 2. Install the map in MapSource
> 3. Create an environment so that it is easily possible to work with the
> display project
> Once that has been done the work can start.

The described toolchain and concentrating on small samples is essential 
for all reverse engineering regarding the garmin format.

If we get this easy and understandable, I'd be able to spent more time 
on testing and trying. At the moment I'm lost with eclipse, java and svn 
...  ;-(

>> It would be helpful if someone (not Steve - he's busy!) could get the
>> documentation updated. I was doing my best on it before I got swamped
>> last year. Not much has changed since then.

I liked the wiki documentation you updated, Wanmil! We should build on 
that and keep it updated ...

BTW: I'm partially confused by the documentation in the svn repository. 
It seems to be partially outdated ... can we (can I?) move this to the 
wiki? Is it really needed in the svn repository?

Peter