Fugawi UK OSGB maps to PathAway

[nessie]

I recently enquired if Fugawi UK maps would support PathAway, as they have for other versions of their products. I got the answer:

At this time there are no immediate plans to add PathAway to Fugawi UK.

Hardly what I wanted to hear, though I have Fugawi UK v2 and I would have to upgrade to Fug. v4 if they did add this feature.

(In the UK the only maps really worth using are the Ordnance Survey 1:50k and 1:25k, or Harvey who do a selection of areas. My Fugawi has the 1:50k scale maps.)

So short of doing screenshots of small areas I wondered if there was a way to get large areas with high levels of detail out of Fugawi, while still adherring to their licence policy: 1600sq km max and one A4 paper size.

After much fiddling I have come up with a process that seems to work. One thing: I'm mainly a Mac user so one of the tools is a shareware Mac one that I own: there must be a PC equivalent.

Tools:
Fugawi (PC)
CutePDF (a free virtual PDF printer for PC)
GraphicConvertor (Mac OS X 'swiss army knife' for graphic processing)
PathAway Map Manager (PC)

1. Install CutePDF too get a virtual printer to capture soft copy image files

2. Set up Fugawi for UK 1:50000 maps to capture 1600sq km in landscape page orientation

1. Set zoom to so that the following instruction can be performed (for me this is 12% zoom)
2. Enable grid lines at 16,000m intervals
3. Size window to be (East x North) 48x32km or 3x2 grid line squares

3. Printing setup (for both default printer and Fugawi printer setup)

1. Select CutePDF as printer.
2. Open printer's Advanced settings:

- paper size A3 (normally not allowed but the 200% scaling zooms an A4 to A3, and this enabled consistent hi-res results)
- select 4000dpi (this is the maximum dpi and smaller may work)
- scale 200%
3. Set Landscape.

4. Printing 1:50000 maps

1. Select all screen area and note Top-Left and Bottom-Right OSGB co-ords (this helps when doing the calibration, esp the major grid names, eg SU, TQ)
2. Hide Fugawi grid lines (otherwise they get printed)

5. Editing PDFs with GraphicConverter (MAC OS X)

1. Set 600dpi when asked during opening the PDF (limitation of my 2GB Mac Mini RAM size?)
2. Carefully select the map image using the Selection tool.
3. Crop the image using Trim Selection (Edit menu)

- Optionally, Save a copy as an image file in this hi-res (JPEG with 95% quality works well)
4. Resize the the map using Picture->Size->Scale:

- Enable 'Proportions', disable 'Scale picture'
- Set pixels to 60 pixels/cm (~152pixels/inch): this is the right scale for my Palm TT3 which has a 320x480 (5.3x8cm screen)
- Enable 'Scale picture'
- Set height to 64cm, width to 96cm. Hit OK (Now you have an image that shows approx 1km per 2cm of my Palm T3 and TX
5. Save copy as ... JPEG with 90% quality with JPEG 6.0 (gives smaller files)
6. Save file. You now have 3 files a large hi-res JPEG a lower-res JPEG for use in PathAway Map Manager and a lower-res PDF (if you need to rework the image)

6. PathAway map conversion

1. Import lower-res JPEG as new map at 100%, compressed
2. Calibrate:

- Type: Projection
- Datum: OSGB
- Projection: Transverse Mercator
- lon_0: W2.000
- lat_0: N49.00
- x_0: 400000
- y_0: -100000
- precisely set at least 2 point: using noted OSGB co-ords of the Fugawi selection as a guide: I use the top-left, bottom-right OSGB grid line intersections nearest to the the corners so I can use the grid reference information that I recorded earlier as a guide.
3. Apply calibration
4. Make sure compression is applied
5. Save as Palm prc file
6. Optionally, save calibration file.

7. Using the map in PathAway

1. Set Preferences->Coordinates, Primary Coordinates

- Position: OSGB
- Datum: deselect 'from map', select 'Ord Srvy Grt Brtn'

That's it! OK so it isn't too easy but it works.

Edit: The files sizes are approximately:
Original PDF: 24 - 30MB
Hi-res JPEG: 60MB
Lower-res JPEG: 14 - 18MB
PathAway map (compressed): 30 - 35MB

Cheers.

[Antony]

I think your method sounds good; I'm still wondering about buying Fugawi, but not really convinced. I wondered if it would let you do something like this.

If, like me, you don't have Fugawi, I found a neat way to get 1:50000 UK maps really easily, which saves the need to buy anything! They aren't so big, but if you get keen you could probably splice a load of them together.

If you vist www.streetmap.co.uk, and select an area you need, you can then edit the URL - there is loads of stuff in it, but there is an X- coordinate, Y- coordinate and a "Z", which I guess is zoom. If you change this to 4 or 6 you get 5km of 1:50000, or 50km of, er, well, a roadmap size map. (You can't do this using the zoom control on the page)

I then do an ALT-PrtScr to grab a copy, and paste it in to a 1000x1000 bitmap in Paint. You can then move it about to get the map to fit the "window" , (or I used to cut the map section out of the image and paste it in to another bitmap window). You can then save this as a JPG file, and you get a 600k or so file which works really well in Pathaway. (I normally compress it by 50%). My old T2 never liked loads of big maps, and this worked ok.

So you have a neat 5Km square map, perfectly aligned and in focus, and the detail is perfect. If youve ever tried scanning maps, you'll appreciate this. Streetmap will give you all the coordinates you need to calibrate it in the map manager or Touratech, and it even has the copyright message in the corner! The calibrate really well, (though often I have to nudge them in to position - what a great feature!)

It's not so good on the roadmaps - they don't calibrate properly - I reckon accuracy is not of major importance on these.

Hope this might help a few of you ... ?

[murraypaul]

If you vist www.streetmap.co.uk, and select an area you need, you can then edit the URL - there is loads of stuff in it, but there is an X- coordinate, Y- coordinate and a "Z", which I guess is zoom. If you change this to 4 or 6 you get 5km of 1:50000, or 50km of, er, well, a roadmap size map. (You can't do this using the zoom control on the page)

Zoom 2 gives you A-Z data around London, and street-level everywhere else. Zoom 8 is a very high level map of the entire country. You can get these through the web site, use the map zoom icons, which take you between odd numbered zooms, and then use the larger size button to get the even numbered zooms, which are bigger screen versions.

It is reasonably simple to knock up a script which will extract these automatically and stitch them together into larger blocks. I've got zoom 8 of the whole of the UK, zoom 6 in 6 files (SE, SW, Midlands, North, Wales and Scotland), and zoom 4 in 50k squares and zoom 2 in 10k for the areas I'm interested in. You are right that the zoom 4 maps are not as accurate, drove me mad trying to calibrate them until I convinced myself it was actually the map that was wrong.

This is all against the terms and conditions, unfortunately.

[Antony]

Hey - that's way better than anything I managed. I never even found the right buttons on the web site!

It is reasonably simple to knock up a script which will extract these automatically and stitch them together into larger blocks

I had a go at this way back when I began with this, but as an SQL developer, reading web pages in code was always a bit beyond me. I managed to save the individual .gif squares, but that was it! I respect that you may not want to divulge these hard learned tricks, or would you give any clues as to how you did it?

[murraypaul]

It is reasonably simple to knock up a script which will extract these automatically and stitch them together into larger blocks

I had a go at this way back when I began with this, but as an SQL developer, reading web pages in code was always a bit beyond me. I managed to save the individual .gif squares, but that was it! I respect that you may not want to divulge these hard learned tricks, or would you give any clues as to how you did it?

Once you've got that far it is just a case of gluing them all together. I initially used montage from the ImageMagick suite then switched to a bit of software called ImageConsole.

The script takes a starting and ending (x,y) pair and a given zoom level, works out how many streetmap screens are needed to build it up, then repeatedly gets each screen, builds those 25 images into a montage, then builds the collection of all of those into a larger montage.

I'd be happy to sent it to you, but it is written to run in perl under the cygwin layer in windows, so it might be quite a hassle for you to get it working.