Re: [Rails-devel] Support Needed: New complex Tiles and Maps

[John A. T. <ja...@ja...>]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 9:54 AM, brett lentz <bre...@gm...> wrote:

> That's a tricky issue. It would be really nice if TileDesigner were open
> sourced, so that we could update it.
>

Hmm, it's not?  At least Marco sent it to me when I asked.

However, it is written in Delphi.  For my use, I reimplemented it in perl,
and that is still what I use to generate the production tiles.  Of course,
the goals for printing are different than for screen (and I made a number
of changes to be able to generate print-ready output and more complex
tiles), but I generate PostScript from the tile definitions and SVG
wouldn't be hard (basically at the rendering stage you have methods for
drawing an arc, circle, etc).

Several years ago I started porting it to Java for use in Rails, but I
didn't have time to finish it.  If someone wants to take that and/or the
perl code and modify I would be happy to send what I have (assuming I can
find the Java port :).


> It might be possible to develop some SVG templates for each of the
> components of a tile. That would allow us to assemble new tiles in Inkscape
> using a standardized set of primitives on a standardized image base.
>

I don't think you want to get in the business of hand-drawing tiles.  Aside
from consistency issues, you will also have to redraw every single tile if
you decide to change some aspect - I think generating them from some tile
description is the way to go.

-- 
John A. Tamplin