download tiles, big maps from tiles, osm city plan, fictional maps and tiled pictures

digital’s digest – what’s this?

Every week I visit a lot of webpages related to geographic, mapping and other “Digital-Geography.com”-stuff. I’m afraid I cannot write full-size articles about these findings. This new post series, which is called “digtial’s digest” gives you a weekly overview about new exciting links and latest found pieces. Every week I would like to discuss the presented topics in the comment section and of course get also your “hottest” geo-related links and stuff. Let’s rock!

1. How to stitch map tiles to get a big map as one file?

This week I was looking for a tool or script, which merges tilesets and exports a big map as one big picture file. I discovered certain ways to do this with Python scripts, online services and some free desktop software. Because I was pinched for time, I used an old-fashioned but well working Windows program called Taho.exe. After installing you define a bounding box, choose your source map-style, some overlays and you are ready to export a map of a defined zoomlevel and pic size. The best thing about it is the possibility to adjust the config file and insert own tile-server-URLs to get a map out of own specific tilesets. Great tool!

Get to the tool of Dimitri Junker – Taho.exe

2. The Python way of downloading OSM tiles

Beside Taho.exe I saw a lot of nice tools written in Python. Because my first approaches to adjust the script failed, I decided to take Taho.exe. The test run with David Baucum’s terminal scripit gives quiet stable results. Check his GitHub Repo to find out more.

osm_download
============

Usage: upper_lat upper_lon lower_lat lower_lon zoom output_directory
Example: ./osm_stitch.py 39.0775 -77.0275 38.984 -76.8656 13 ~/

3. Get big maps out of tiled data via browser application

The third way to get big maps out of tiled data is a web services called BigMap 2. The tool is really easy to use. Zoom to an area, click the submit button, resize your map and get a permalink, OZI, WLD-file or download it as a picture. It’s a pitty that you can’t define your own tile-server, but for a fast OSM map export it works fine!

Here you get to the web service of Ilya Zverev: link or check out GitHub.

4. osm city map tool – MapOSMatic

Printing OSM tiles to one big map is easy. Creating a city plan with street register is not. Gilles Lamiral’s, a developer of the OpenSteetMap-Project, MapOSMatic webapp gives you an easy approach to get city maps with extended layout features. After choosing you location, you have to decide whether you want a full-page layout with the street index at the bottom, a full-page layout with the street index on the side, a full-page layout without street index or a multi-page layout. After that you set the mapstyle (default OSM, MapQuest or MapOSMatic stylesheet), a preferred paper size (up to A0) and the paper orientation. The final options are the map title and language. Finally you get a real good looking pdf map export.

Here you get your own city plan out of maposmatic.org.

5. Images as Maps – togeo.py

Last but not least I found an easy way to cut normal pictures into tiles and get them shown with a modern map framework like Leaflet.js. Tom MacWright wrote a good overview article about this thematic in which he explains the usage of togeo.py.

If you want to know more about this script and its possibilities, follow this link.

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