[Xastir] Garmin IMG support? (was: Xastir Source control)

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2012 at 08:28:56AM +0300, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <oh2kku at iki.fi> flavor, containing:
> On 6.8.2012 21:06, Tom Russo wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 06, 2012 at 10:40:52AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <wa7nwp at gmail.com> flavor, containing:
> >> instructions...   Is it really true that we're still using CVS?    Not
> 
> > Yes.  There has been no compelling reason to switch to SVN.  If it ain't
> > broke...
> 
> You meant switching to git, right?-)

Yech.

> Sorry for highjacking the thread, but has anyone ever used or tried to 
> use Garmin img format map files in Xastir? Does any of the map libraries 
> support it?

None of the open source libraries I know of support garmin img format.  The
only program I know of that *produce* garmin img format data is "cGPSmapper"
(http://www.cgpsmapper.com/) which is not free, and which is actually 
extremely expensive for the fully featured version.

As far as I know, there are no tools for converting the img format to anything
usable off of a garmin device, and no tools for using them directly.  It is
effectively a closed format.

> The reason I'm asking is that the land survey of Finland finally this 
> year granted free access to topograhic map data of Finland. A guy then 
> massaged this data into a nice compact unlocked Garmin img format file. 
> It looks really nice on a Garmin device and the whole country (300 000+ 
> km^2) fits into a 1,4 gigabyte file.

You would be better off getting the topographic data and massaging them into
an open format instead.

> The topo data is of course available in other formats as well (both 
> vector and raster), it will just take some more effort to make the 
> vector data work in Xastir. Shapefiles and dbfawk is probably the way to 
> go if Garmin img is not usable?

Yes, shapefile is probably the best way to go, as it is the vector format with
the best support in Xastir, and with the most flexibility for display (through 
dbfawk).  Or create pre-rendered rasters with some tool and chop 'em up into
smaller tiles for fast display (easier said than done, of course).  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick