Open Chart Standard

[cagney]

Don B
I made a png of the attached file. Opened perfectly in MapCal!
Thomas

[Don B. Cilly]

Originally Posted by cagney

I made a png of the attached file. Opened perfectly in MapCal!

Yes. Yes. I said "disregard" :)
I just fell victim to the betatester curse, I just had to send you the wrong file. As Soap was saying in that movie about assumptions...

I did some reasonably thorough testin'.
(Note: this applies to mapcal with wine. In Windows they all open).
It has to do with size. It's not exact. The black icons also have to do with size, but it's a different thing, although it's easy to get misled, as I was, the threshold is different.

With BMPs, mapcal won't open anything over (roughly) 13 megs.
With pngs, see attached text file, it varies, (probably depending on color depth or something) but it's definitely a size thing, around 400K seems to be the thing.

Note: Loads slow means just that, NO means just that too, I am positive they won't load however much you wait, apart from trying (to wait) you can see it immediately from CPU load, the NOs give up almost immediately, the slows take the CPU load way up for a few seconds (up to 10 or so).

We should have some good clues for Mr. Holmes now, the ones I gave before were pretty useless.

- D.

[cagney]

Originally Posted by cagney

One thing that must be possible to do with ImageMagic is to automate what I did with Gimp.
*Find a command that add some colors in the upper left corner.
*Save the new picture, perhaps as png, and then transform it to gif and finally tif, in the usual way.
I think this will force the picture to be acceptable to tif2bsb.
Anyone with some deeper knowledge in ImageMagic??
I'll do some RTFM:ing later.......

Thomas

I have found a way with ImageMagic:

convert test.gif -font courier -fill red -gravity SouthEast -pointsize 10 -annotate +3+18 'OpenCPN' annotate.gif

This command writes the text 'OpenCPN' in font-size 10 in red text in the lower right hand corner of the picture 'test.gif' and saves this as the new picture 'annotate.gif'
When converting annotate.gif to a .tif image I get

BITSPERSAMPLE=8

which should work just fine with tif2bsb.

Thomas

[Don B. Cilly]

I'd like to know,
those of you who use MapCal with Wine, do you have the same size problems, or is it my hardware that's not up to it?
I only have a little netbook with an Atom and 1Gig ram at the moment, as my Cray is presently on loan to Spectre I have no way to test it otherwise...

- D.

[dacust]

Originally Posted by Don B. Cilly

I'd like to know,
those of you who use MapCal with Wine, do you have the same size problems, or is it my hardware that's not up to it?
I only have a little netbook with an Atom and 1Gig ram at the moment, as my Cray is presently on loan to Spectre I have no way to test it otherwise...

- D.

You blew it. You never loan out your truck, and you never, Never, NEVER loan out your Cray.

-dan

[Don B. Cilly]

You never argue with Spectre either, only my cousin James B. (another branch of the family) does that.

[dacust]

Originally Posted by Don B. Cilly

You never argue with Spectre either, only my cousin James B. (another branch of the family) does that.

OK. Point taken.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well well well,
my heartfelt thanks to all you guys, lack of Crays notwithstanding, my Western Mediterranean is beginning to look good:



The Eastern part looks just as good actually. Now for the North Atlantic and the Caribbean...
As soon as this does develop into an open chart standard, I'll have quite a few nice and reliable charts for ya'll.

- D.

[sinbad7]

Don.B.Cilly..

Seems a little 'Cilly' to display your commercial .bsb charts of the Med in this Open Chart Standard thread?

[cagney]

Congratulations Don!

I can see that you have been working hard with your chart conversions. Thank you for making me have a second go at all them tiles

Thomas

[Don B. Cilly]

Hey Thomas,
I could certainly never have done it without that join-pcx thing. Thank you.

And Sinbad, well, we haven't got the open standard yet, have we?
Maybe I missed it..
Thanks to everyone's efforts we may be progressing towards it, though.
And what better way to start than using the charts I have?
I do have the original CDs for them, I'm not giving them away or anything, just making them usable (opencpn would not read them tiled, and Maptech won't run on linux)...but in the process learning a lot, and sharing all knowledge I can.

- D.

[Don B. Cilly]

Attn. Thomas/cagney/taifun:
(but if anyone else is interested, obviously...)

How difficult would it be to write a little script (in shell/python/ruby/whatever) that
1) passes the kap filename to bsb2tif and converts it
2) opens the resulting tif in ImageViewer
3) When IV is closed, deletes the tif

so if I "open with" [kapview.sh] a kap file, I see it?

At the moment I have .kaps set to open with the hex editor :-/

- D.

[sinbad7]

Don B.

Here is a utility which converts a .kap chart to .png:

It also procuces a .kap chart from a .png and a CHART.DIR file.

[cagney]

Originally Posted by Don B. Cilly

Attn. Thomas/cagney/taifun:
(but if anyone else is interested, obviously...)

How difficult would it be to write a little script (in shell/python/ruby/whatever) that
1) passes the kap filename to bsb2tif and converts it
2) opens the resulting tif in ImageViewer
3) When IV is closed, deletes the tif

so if I "open with" [kapview.sh] a kap file, I see it?

At the moment I have .kaps set to open with the hex editor :-/

- D.

Something like this?

#!/bin/sh
touch new.png
bsb2png $1 new.png
gimp new.png
unlink new.png

Change code to suit your needs.

Thomas

[Don B. Cilly]

Originally Posted by cagney

Something like this?

Something like that indeed :-)

Change code to suit your needs.

I just changed

gimp new.png

to

eog new.png

(which is Eye of Gnome, a lot faster than the Gimp on my non-Cray:)
I called it kapview, made it exec, put it in /usr/local/bin, right-clicked on a .kap and told it to open it with that as default.

Quick, clean (doesn't leave stuff lying around) and very useful.

Thanks, nice shot (as the French say ;)

- D.