Open Chart Standard

[Psyches]

Originally Posted by Don B. Cilly

Some sort of chartload.log.
It would be very useful to know which of your over 9000 charts are actually used and which are just taking up space on the disk.

OpenCPN supports a --verbose cmd line argument. Before the 1.3.5 merge, I had verbose logs doing exactly this, into the standard OpenCPN log. I haven't checked to see if this made it into the 1.3.6 code base.

So you might try it, and if it didn't make it into the merge, we can make sure it gets into the next round. Sorry I can't validate it myself at present.

Mark

[Don B. Cilly]

Originally Posted by Psyches

OpenCPN supports a --verbose cmd line argument.
Mark

It does. Actually it seems to generate the same sort of log whether you give it --verbose or not. I had lots of entries from previous chart loadings.
The log is in my home directory, and called, as expected, opencpn.log.
I just hadn't noticed it

Some are quite useful, e.g:
Line Index corrupt, recreating Index for chart /path/YYY.KAP
(charts that give this error seem to be the ones that Sinbad made that did not show up in the prieview window but still worked).

Georeference Chart_Error_Factor on chart is 0.091157/path/ZZZ.KAP
(this was the first version of the Ibiza chart Sinbad made with the wrong stitching etc.).

Very good.
So I guess the feature request now is, make entries in the log for files found in the chart directories that cannot be recognized as charts at all - like Unrecognized chart format /path/to/chart/nosuchluck.crp

That would help to get rid of/fix unwanted files.

- D.

[GPS-Marco]

Originally Posted by Don B. Cilly

Line Index corrupt, recreating Index for chart /path/YYY.KAP
(charts that give this error seem to be the ones that Sinbad made that did not show up in the prieview window but still worked).

Georeference Chart_Error_Factor on chart is 0.091157/path/ZZZ.KAP
(this was the first version of the Ibiza chart Sinbad made with the wrong stitching etc.).

Ciao, from my experience, first error occurs when you make a manual change (with a text editor) to the KAP map. If you want to make such changes, you should run bsbfix.exe from libbsb tools to restore the correct KAP index. Second error occurs when the georef polinomial calculated by OCPN is not able to optimize all the ref points: either the poly is not right of one or more ref points are wrong.

Ciao, Marco

[cagney]

To edit a kap file you need a hex-editor, also called a binary-editor.
Apart from that slip on the keyboard, Marco is spot on.

Thomas

[GPS-Marco]

Originally Posted by cagney

To edit a kap file you need a hex-editor, also called a binary-editor.
Apart from that slip on the keyboard, Marco is spot on.

Thomas

Thomas, I can edit the header of the kap file with notepad++.

Then, after you save, tha map is slightly broken (does not open in MapCal, Seaclear, Polarview, but it works in OCPN without major problems).

To fix the edited map, just use bsbfix.exe

Ciao, Marco.

[cagney]

Don B. Cilly and others....
New version of pcx2tif uploaded.
Thomas

[sinbad7]

Thomas..

None of my .kap conversions will run on Fugawi ENC or SeaClear.
I think there is something missing in the header files. Any ideas?

I'd like to download the latest ver. of mc2bsbh but I have clean forgotten WHERE?

Did you read the possibilties of the WMS system?

/Tore

[Don B. Cilly]

Originally Posted by cagney

New version of pcx2tif uploaded.

I added a note with my special relativity theories on it to the "manual".

Sinbad, the mc2bsbh page is here.

- Don

[cagney]

Originally Posted by sinbad7

Thomas..

None of my .kap conversions will run on Fugawi ENC or SeaClear.
I think there is something missing in the header files. Any ideas?

I'd like to download the latest ver. of mc2bsbh but I have clean forgotten WHERE?

Did you read the possibilties of the WMS system?

/Tore

Sinbad, you must have a very old version of mc2bsbh. This has been up before. SeaClear loads unless the following line is missing in the kap header.

VER/2.0

Put it as the first line for good measure!
I think it is months since Marco changed this.

Thomas

[Don B. Cilly]

Actually the real issue I have with this Linux conversion is the "black bmp"s I get with the imagemagick conversion. Some 50% of them.
They look like this:


The Nautilus filemanager won't preview them, but they open fine in Image viewer, Gimp, anything. That would not matter at all, except, MapCal under Wine won't open them at all.
So to do the ones I did so far I used MapCal in Windows, which opened them fine, but I'd really like to find a way to do it all with Linux.

After some searching and trying I may have found a "fix" for it, but it's rather laborious, so I thought I'd ask here to see if I can get a simpler way.

The fix I use is, open the tif file with the Gimp and saving it as bmp - note that it works only if I tick the "Run Lengh-Encoded" box, which is not default, so maybe there's a way to do that with the convert command?

I did have a look at the manpage for convert, but all I got so far is a headache...

[GPS-Marco]

Hi. Why not working with png instead of bmp?

Ciao, Marco.

[Don B. Cilly]

Originally Posted by GPS-Marco

Hi. Why not working with png instead of bmp?

Because MapCal won't open those.. uh, wait a sec, it does

Well, then because some idiot suggested that as MapCal didn't open tifs, it would be a good idea to do it with bmps, and I have it all set up for bmps... uh, I think it was me

The reasoning was, since I have to calibrate a different file format than the tif I use to make the kap, the less compression, the best impression, I throw the file away anyway, bmp's got no compression...

How was I to know about the black magick stuff

I'll test it (I have to generate a few, in case it makes "black" pngs too, or MapCal doesn't really like pngs...)

Grazie Marco

P.S. Mannaggialamaialazzozzamaledettavellazoccolatesenc ...

P.P.S.
If MapCal opened tifs or if tif2bsb could use pngs, or if they just could agree on one file format, it would be good, eh?

[GPS-Marco]

Well, I use png only in mapcal. I can assure it works (if you see inside my CHARTCAL.DIR in KapGen, all maps are calibrated in MapCal using png).

As you know, png compression is lossless... so: bmp and png = same impression (just a couple of seconds to open/save in png...)

Ciao, Marco.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, I made me a little batch script and converted more than 150 tifs to pngs, didn't take long even on my little netbook. Not one of them turned out "black". I calibrated a couple of them in MapCal, worked just fine. I should have asked before (actually I did, but I guess you missed it).

Ok, now I'll go and change the instructions in the manual, again, and ask Thomas to modify his pcx-stitching script, again (this is in a sort of Greenbo, Alabama, voice).

Grazie bel colpo (come dicono i francesi)

- D.

[GPS-Marco]

Originally Posted by Don B. Cilly

I should have asked before (actually I did, but I guess you missed it).

Ok, now I'll go and change the instructions in the manual, again, and ask Thomas to modify his pcx-stitching script, again (this is in a sort of Greenbo, Alabama, voice).

Ciao Don..

I don't know why bmp does not work to you. From a theoretically point of view it should work. This is the reason I didn't tell you to try png before.

About the manual, I've a couple of comments: The processes on linux and windows are really similar. Why not describing a generic process (valid on both) specifing the differences only where needed?

Moreover the sentence

You should also enter at least Scale (found on the chart)
Depth Units, Projection (Mercator most likely),
Datum (WGS84 most likely) and under Latitude,
the mean latitude of you chart (not critical).

is not exact: under Latitude you should put 0 (zero) for mercator projections. This is very important.

In the KapGen Readme.txt (and in the KapGen.cmd itself...) there are some information about the process you may be interested in. Give it a look.

Ciao, Marco.