MapVas

A map canvas showing OSM tiles with drawing functionality. The repo contains two binaries,

• mapvas: the map window
• mapcat: an equivalent to cat to draw polygons on the map.

Setup

Make sure you have the nighly Rust toolchain installed.

• Install Rust.

Manually:

• Clone this repository.
• cd mapvas ; cargo install --path . --locked

Via cargo from crates.io:

• cargo install mapvas --locked

Via brew on MacOs:

• brew tap udho/mapvas && brew install mapvas

Usage

mapvas

Start mapvas and a map window will appear.

mapcat

Mapcat currently reads only input from stdin and reads it line by line and pipes and uses it using various parser. It then shows the parsed result on a single instance of mapvas, which it spawns if none is running.

Grep (default)

This parser greps for coordinates latitude and longitude as float in a line. In addition it supports colors and filling of polygons.

The input can come from a pipe or from files.

    mapcat <files_with_coordinates>

Examples:

• draws a point at Berlin Alexanderplatz:

    echo "52.521853, 13.413015" | mapcat

• draws a line between Berlin and Cologne and a red line between Cologne and Amsterdam:

    echo "50.942878, 6.957936 52.521853, 13.413015 green\n 50.942878, 6.957936 52.373520, 4.899766 red" | mapcat

• draws a yellow polyline Cologne-Berlin-Amsterdam:

    echo "50.942878, 6.957936 random garbage words 52.521853, 13.413015 yellow spaces after the coordinate-comma is not important: 52.373520,4.899766" | mapcat

• draws a blue transparently filled polygon Cologne-Berlin-Amsterdam note that a fill ("transparent" or "solid"):

    echo "50.942878, 6.957936 52.521853, 13.413015 52.373520,4.899766 blue transparent" | mapcat

Filling a polyline causes it to be drawn as closed polygon.

• --invert-coordinates (-i) reverses the order of lat/lon:

    echo "13.413015, 52.521853" | mapcat -i

• clears all elements from the map.

echo "clear" | mapcat

The -r parameter clears the map before drawing new elements.

echo "52.5,12.5" | mapcat -r

• --label-pattern (-l) defines a label pattern. A near label is shown when right click on the map happens. The label is copied (when shown) via the c key. The label requires exactly one capture group to be in the pattern. Default is "(.*)" which captures everything.

echo "52.4,12.4" | mapcat -l "(.*)"

• --focus (-f) zooms and pans to show all elements on the map.

• --screenshot <file.png> takes a screenshot of the map. If the mapvas is not already running it should probably be combined with -f.

Random (for performance testing)

Draws a random polyline of a given length. The following command draws a random walk consisting of 20000 polylines of a random length between 1 and 10.

    echo "20000" | mapcat -p random

TTJson

Draws routes or ranges from the TomTom routing api.

curl 'https://api.tomtom.com/routing/1...' | mapcat -p ttjson -c green

Advanced usage

Offline usage

To cache tile images for future runs set the environment variable TILECACHE to an existing directory.

    mkdir ~/.tilecache
    export TILECACHE=~/.tilecache

Different map tile url

To use tiles from a different provider than [openstreetmap] you can set a templated url. The url must contain {zoom}, {x}, and {y}. The tile provider should return tiles in the pseudo/spherical-mercator projection in a size of 512x512 pixel. Examples:

    export MAPVAS_TILE_URL='https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png'
    export MAPVAS_TILE_URL='https://api.tomtom.com/map/1/tile/basic/main/{zoom}/{x}/{y}.png?tileSize=512&key=***'
    export MAPVAS_TILE_URL='https://maps.hereapi.com/v3/background/mc/{zoom}/{x}/{y}/png8?size=512&apiKey=***'