Peleg

Re : SVG maps

Hello Peleg.

Thanks for supporting my work on maps, it's always valuable to know that people like them.

Glad to see you're interested in cartography which is a very interesting subject. Unfortunately I don't have tutorials links to indicate you through the Web but only some interesting and valuable general sites :Relief Shading, Shaded Relief and Terrain Map (this latest has some tutorials). Out of these three main sites, I learned how to create maps all by myself, spending days and days, or even weeks, searching the best elevation data providers and trying several solutions for finally being able to produce the result you can see.

As there is no site from my knowledge on the Web describing with precision how to create topographic maps using digital elevation models, specifically for our encyclopaedic use (with vectorized elevation levels), I decided to write those tutorials myself in order for other contributors being able to draw the same types of maps. These tutorials aren't still finished as they are quiet long because they enter in details so anybody, even without prior specific graphical abilities, should be able to use them. I've got still lot of work to do on them before putting them « officially » online. They will be first in French, but an English contributor already proposed me to translate them. If you want, when the time has come, I will contact you again to give you the links.

A precision about my maps : most of them (like the one of Chios you give in the link) using in the file name the expression [ topographic_map ] are full SVG maps, with the elevation and depth levels in SVG as well as the whole text and additional data. They only use a raster image for the shaded relief, impossible to vectorize, which is embedded in the SVG file. This image of the shadows is not really necessary for a good topographic map, but I think it helps a lot in the visualization of the relief. An other type of maps I usually designate as [ relief_map] use a full raster (JPG) background with blended colours for the elevation levels. In these ones, only the additional data (roads, text, etc.) are in SVG for easy modification and translation.

I hope these few explanations will help you a bit to start in this area. I will also try to hurry the finalization of the tutorials as people starts to ask about them. If you have other questions, I'll be happy to answer them.

Greetings. Sting 23:08, 2 December 2007 (UTC)