The elder gods, manifesting through Henry Hartley, recently decreed: > On Tue, 29 March 2005 at 10:01 AM Didier said: > >>> Does anybody know some kind of program in linux that can draw >>> custom maps from point A to point B? All parameters should come >>> from user input and also the program shoud be able to place some >>> nice graphics in the place of houses, buildings and so on... >>> >>> I want to draw a map to indicate to people how to get to point X. >>> But I wanted to make it more lively instead of plainly drawing >>> roads and boxes to represent buildings. I want something more >>> colorful but do not which to resort to something like gimp! > > It isn't clear from this if you are looking for something to do some > manual drawing in (implied by your mention of GIMP) or if you are trying > to automate the process (implied by the first paragraph). If you just > want to do freehand drawing, take a look at Inkscape [1]. It's does > vector drawing so you can scale your output easily. GIMP is not really > designed for this sort of thing. Also, Inkscape uses an XML file format > called SVG [2]. > > If you want to have a map generated programatically, then I'm not really > sure. I suppose it depends on what sort of map data you have and what > sort of output you want. You could write something that would generate > an SVG map based on some kind of map data but without knowing what the > data looked like, I wouldn't really know where to start. If that's what the OP is looking for, then mapserver (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/) is one approach that I've played with. If that's the route you want to go, though, you're looking at some serious time investment in the intricacies and mysteries of GIS. -- Sláinte, Richard S. Crawford (AIM: Buffalo2K) http://www.mossroot.com http://www.stonegoose.com/catseyeview "We live as though the world were how it should be, to show it what it can be." --"Angel", Season 4 ep. 1
