It's good!

However I have a couple of concerns.

First of all, the package you use to convert images to coordinates is difficult to use. If I want to import a map of 3 countries, I have to click the right spots exactly, and I have to click a lot of different spots unless all the borders/coastlines are straight or almost straight. However it is better than none at all.

Second of all, aren't there already systems available with coordinate information for the outlines of all current countries that you can get online? Subdivisions of individual countries may be more difficult to find, but just country outlines (and maybe capital cities?) you should be able to get off the internet.

Mark

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:21:24 +0100, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:

I have set up an early testing version of my map drawing software. It can be found at

http://magnusmanske.de/wikimaps

Note: You'll see SVGs directly. So, you'll need a browser that natively supports SVG (Konqueror, some Mozilla builds) or a plugin.

The site is basically a 1.4 MediaWiki with an extension called "geomap". You can see the invokation in the source of the main page.

The actual map rendering extension is running on its own, using the MediaWiki database as data source. It outputs SVG, which is embedded as an object in the actual wiki page output.

I will add my demo data of the rest of Germany tonight, so there's more to see than Bavaria...

Please note that the SVG is actually generated in *real-time*, on *each view*. Of course, in its final form, it would cache the SVG, and also offer rendered PNGs. I'm not quite there yet, as ImageMagick tends to die on SVG-to-PNG conversion :-(

Please visit the demo site, have a look, tweak some stuff (add a city, resize Bavaria;-) and tell me if (and how) we should make this a "real" Wikimedia project.

Magnus _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l