On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 08:13:39PM -0600, Alex Feldman wrote:

Hi,

I have limited experience with Gimp, almost all of it with photographs, and essentially none with Inkscape. I want to make some simple maps of trails in the area, and mark them with mileages and a few comments. My plan was to download the photographs of the area from Google Earth, put a layer over it, and trace out the trails. Then I can stretch or shrink the image and add the decorations and commentary.

My question is, which is the best tool for this? Or is there a better way to do it than what I am describing? Thanks for the help.

I think you need to work backwards from what is your intended use. Web, paper print?

So what size are the photographs from Google earth?

What I have done is simply scanned a road map/atlas at a fairly high resolution, added layers of routes and comments then resized to suit.

Resizing up doesn't always work real well.

Inkscape is good for making route profiles, you can stretch in both directions to give make the route look easy or hard :-)

Owen

Hi,

Alex Feldman a écrit :

Hi,

I have limited experience with Gimp, almost all of it with photographs, and essentially none with Inkscape. I want to make some simple maps of trails in the area, and mark them with mileages and a few comments. My plan was to download the photographs of the area from Google Earth, put a layer over it, and trace out the trails. Then I can stretch or shrink the image and add the decorations and commentary.

My question is, which is the best tool for this? Or is there a better way to do it than what I am describing? Thanks for the help.

For that I use both. In the first Gimp is better make specific selections on the map (rivers...) and transform it in path. For the roads I prefer make paths manually over the map, stroke these paths on specific layers with correct line width and convert these strokes in paths. Remove initial paths drawn and you can export all paths in svg file smaller and more easy to resize than xcf file. After it is more easy to modify it this inkscape.

But perhaps there is best ways to make this work.

Luc.

Alex Feldman wrote:

Hi,

I have limited experience with Gimp, almost all of it with photographs, and essentially none with Inkscape. I want to make some simple maps of trails in the area, and mark them with mileages and a few comments. My plan was to download the photographs of the area from Google Earth, put a layer over it, and trace out the trails. Then I can stretch or shrink the image and add the decorations and commentary.

My question is, which is the best tool for this? Or is there a better way to do it than what I am describing? Thanks for the help.

Wouldn't it be better to build your overlays in Google Earth? Then you could save
the kml data for later use or uploading to the web. What you are suggesting would
work, but the "best" solution would be to use GIS software for this task. There are a
number of open source and freeware GIS tools, the biggest problem is that in general
they are not designed to directly access the Google data. That can be worked around,
but probably is more work than you are interested in, unless you expect to do more
mapping applications. When you say you want to "download the photographs" do you
mean using the Google map api, or taking screenshots of a Google Earth view? Or are you using one of the pay versions of GE (I think these offer more options, but
haven't investigated).

scott s. .

Alex Feldman writes:

I have limited experience with Gimp, almost all of it with photographs, and essentially none with Inkscape. I want to make some simple maps of trails in the area, and mark them with mileages and a few comments. My plan was to download the photographs of the area from Google Earth, put a layer over it, and trace out the trails. Then I can stretch or shrink the image and add the decorations and commentary.

My question is, which is the best tool for this? Or is there a better way to do it than what I am describing? Thanks for the help.

Since you're starting with a bitmapped image anyway (a satellite photo), GIMP is fine. Any problems you get from rescaling the trails will also be problems when rescaling the image, so you wouldn't get any advantage from using Inkscape.

I've used GIMP to make map overlays: for instance, a topographic map layer, a trail map (converted from the park's online PDF), and a geologic map layer (converted from a USGS PDF). Then I can adjust the transparencies and colors of all the layers depending on which combination I want to print out for a specific project. It's a lot of work getting everything scaled just right (it would be so much easier if this info was all available in open GIS formats that worked in free mapping software ... maybe some day!) but the results can be very useful.