rmap
I've given up supporting this project. If someone wants to take over, email me
Introduction
Simply put, rmap is a package that will allow you to generate images of the earth from a distance or fairly zoomed in. The code is a small C binary that reads a datafile of vectors to generate the image. The actual image is generated from the libgd library, which will either generate a gif, png, or jpeg based on the version of libgd and auxiliary libs you have. Please see the libgd documentation regarding any auxiliary libs your version might require. I've tried to make the code be intelligent when you run configure, but I've not done much testing of it yet.
The Data
History
This package derived out of my personal need for a mapping system that was accurate across the globe in terms of longitude and latitude positioning. I found references to the CIA's Data Bank II which consists of 3 9-Track tapes of COBAL data that ran on old mainframes which had decent vector data of the earth, and that were also in the public domain. However, trying to find these on the Internet proved to be a challenge. I finally came across a set of data files derived from the CIA's Data Bank files which were compressed in an odd format and made to run on old old terminals using some Fortran program. I wrote some code to convert the mass of datafiles into one larger one that contained all the data as well as was fairly fast at accessing it. And that's the history of the origin on the vector data file.Type of data
The following types of data are available for plotting. By editing the rmap.color file which is installed in the same directory as the earth.rez vector file (usually in /usr/local/share/rmap/ or /usr/share/rmap/), you can specify what you want to be displayed, and in what color. You can also copy this file into your home directory and rename it .rmaprc in case you can't edit the rmap.color file in it's installed location. You can also give rmap a command line option pointing to the colormap file you would like used. Boundary
| Costs, Islands and Lakes
| Rivers
|
Screenshots
- Image of the earth, centered on Sydney
- 30x zoom of sydney
- Image of the earth, centered on San Francisco
- 60x zoom of San Francisco
Windows Support
I got this email from Oliver, and he was able to get rmap to compile under windows with cygwin.Hi,
I compiled and run rmap succesfully under windows and cygwin.
I made only one type of changes in order to work without crash :
I changed open, read and lseek with fopen, fread and fseek.
Downloading
Current Version is 1.2Current Develpment Version is 1.5 (Download earth.rez seperatly here (46M Uncompressed) or the full rmap-1.2.tar.gz below, then install rmap-nodata.1.5.0.tar.gz to upgrade)
The ChangeLog is here.
- If you already have a previous version of rmap installed
Download rmap-nodata-1.2.tar.gz (59k) or ramp-nodata-1.5.0.tar.gz (72k). Run configure, then edit config.h and change VECTORFILE to point to the location of previously installed earth.rez. It is probably in either /usr/local/share/rmap/earth.rez or /usr/share/rmap/earth.rez. In most cases, you won't have to edit it at all if you gave configure the same options. Then compile the code and install the new version (i.e. make install).
- If you don't have a previous version or if you need have a lot of bandwidth and don't want to bother editing any files
Download ramp-1.2.tar.gz (~9 Megs), run configure, then run make install. This should configure the program for your system and install it. You must have libgd installed. If not, you can get it here.