Nov 23
This article is a step-by-step guide to render your own sea charts. I assume that you have already installed it to your system. If not, download the latest version and run ./configure and make and make install as usual. Make sure that you have installed the packages libcairo2-dev, librsvg2-dev, and libfontconfig-dev. You also may have …
Apr 30
Smrender is a powerful, flexible, and modular rule-based rendering engine for OpenStreetmap data. Its primary development goal was and still is to develop a renderer for paper nautical charts. Because of its very generic and modular software design it can be used for charts of any map style and it is also perfectly suitable for …
May 05
Everybody with a handheld GPS device or a smart phone may contribute to the map of OpenStreetmap. In contrast, to contribute to OpenSeamap — which is the OSM-based sea chart variant — it requires to measure the depth of sea. Of course, a sea map contains a lot of features which can still be mapped …
Feb 22
KAP files (sometimes also referred to as BSB files) are raster images which contains a header with geographic information. Those files are typically used for raster navigational charts. Josm is a powerful editor for Openstreetmap data. There is a plugin called the Piclayer plugin (see also here) which allows to load any image into Josm …
Feb 11
About one month of intensive work and it is done! Smrender now uses libcairo as a graphics library for rendering instead of libgd. The major advantages of this change are qualitiy improvement of the output images, performance improvement, and the ability to create native vector-based PDF documents. It was a long outstanding task for me …
Dec 06
Smrender is a powerful and flexible renderer to create paper charts. 🙂 With the latest release several cool improvements have been done. The following list gives a brief overview. Conditional rendering. Support for tile creation. Bounding box may be used to specify area of rendering instead of center point. Bugfix in polygon closing action cat_poly(). …
Nov 25
Smrender is a powerful renderer mainly designed to create paper sea charts. I added the feature of tile creation to Smrender which was not really difficult. Smrender is designed to create paper charts but it is easy to cut tiles as soon as you have a raster image with appropriate coordinates and projection. Here is …
Oct 24
There was nearly two months of develop going since my last release of Smrender. Today I released a new version (SVN revision 1326) with a lot of new features. For a quick overview have a look at the News on the project’s web page. Dynamic Symbols Renamed The most important thing for all of you …
Sep 06
Smrender is a generic renderer which generates raster images out of OSM data. A user-defined ruleset is applied to the OSM data to create the final output image. The primary goal of Smrender is to create high-quality charts suitable for print-out. Although it originally was intended to make sea charts, it can be used for …