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

[brett l. <bre...@gm...>]

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 10:52 AM, John A. Tamplin <ja...@ja...> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Unless the code has an explicit OSS license assigned that's compatible with
the license used by Rails, we can't really use Marco's code even if you
have it.


> 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).
>

Yep. Jumping from Postscript to SVG is pretty easy. IIRC, Perl has GSAPI,
which hooks into Ghostscript and can do that heavy-lifting.


>
> 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 :).
>

If you're willing to contribute your Perl and/or Java code under the GPL
v2+ license that Rails uses, we can probably make use of it. Posting the
code to the list is a reasonable way to start.


>
>
>> 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.
>
>
I agree. It's not ideal, but implementing our own tile drawing engine is
also not very appealing. ;-)

The nice thing about using SVG is that certain classes of problems are at
least a non-issue, when compared to the bitmap-based tile sets.


> --
> John A. Tamplin
>
>
---Brett.