I know that several people have asked for Swiss maps to be included in the MM portfolio but as this is not forthcoming I have been looking into downloading and calibrating my own.

To this end I have used the Swiss Mobility Site (http://map.schweizmobile.ch) and printing A4 sheets to PDF files. To use these in MM I then have to calibrate them, using MAPC2MAPC. A long and involved process.

Does anyone have a method to streamline this task perhaps by enabling multiple prints and/or including a calibration file ?

Thanks, in anticipation

BrokenBoots.

I'd like to help but I'm struggling ... where exactly on http://map.schweizmobile.ch/ are the maps?

And "printing A4 sheets to PDF files" is a just bit gnomic for me ...

Bertie

Hello Bertie.

I am not sure where the "http://" part of the address came from I just put "map.schweizmobil.ch" into my browser and up comes the map site. At this stage it shows the whole of Switzerland. You can keep zooming in until you get the bit you require, chose "Print" and chose the scale required from the scale drop down box. This gives you the choice of landscape or portrait. In this case "Print" generates a PDF file downloaded onto your computer. From here I use PhotoShopElements to extract the map element to a 8bit png file. I then use MAPC2MAPC to calibrate it.

This is all very time consuming and prone to error. What I am after is a simplified process if that is possible.

BrokenBoots.

http://www.schweizmobil.ch/en/welcome.cfm works for me.

Have you tried Map Capture or Map Grabber? I haven't used either for a while and I remember a fair bit of headscratching and trial & error before getting it right, but at least it automates the download process & you won't have to extract an image from a pdf.

Also, my ancient version of Photoshop Elements has a Photomerge utility (File > Photomerge).

If there's enough of an overlap between images (and not too many images) it will merge them automatically; if it doesn't do it automatically, you can drag and drop the individual images into place. You must have an overlap though, otherwise there will be a visible gap at the join.

Ah, now I see!

The area which the web site allows you to save as a PDF is pretty small especially if you want a map at 1:25,000. You might instead try using a screen grab utility to get much bigger chunks of map at a time. I use Faststone Capture which used to be free but see http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-fr ... tility.htm for others.

Set your browser to full screen mode and zoom the map to whatever scale you want. Use the grabber to capture as much map area as you sensibly can. I did a trial run just now and I would say that a single screen grab covers at least 3 times more than you are allowed to have on the PDFs.

What to do with your screen grabs? You can set up Faststone so that it will save each image automatically as a TIFF file on your pc. Once you have captured all the area you want, you can calibrate each TIFF image directly in Memory Map (if you have the right version... ) I noticed that the web site helpfully gives coordinates but they are not in lat/long (UTM?). And once you have have calibrated them, you can merge the lot in MM too. Merging in MM seems to works better than merging in imaging software - not sure why and you need very little overlap between images.

OTOH, doing your merging first in imaging software will greatly reduce the tedium of calibrating lots of separate TIFF images.

This process will still be pretty tedious but at least a good deal less so than your current one. The screen capture utility will save bigger chunks of map and in a file format that MM or MAPC2MAPC can work with straightaway.

Hope this helps. If you try either of flyboy's suggestions for map-capturing software, I'd be interested to know how you got on.

Bertie

Hi,

AFAIK MM merges purely from the calibration data (not the image itself) and splices at the "boundary" (route) of one of the maps. Note that there is a bug which causes narrow (white) gaps to appear with very long East-West edges.

By "imaging software" I presume you mean a utility which automatically merges (optically) photographs to produce "panoramas", etc.? Personally, I just use the "Print Screen" key (to put the grab into the clipboard) and then paste into an image-processing program. Mine is an ancient version of Paintshop Pro (which was free on a magazine cover CD) but there should be other suitable free packages. It's normally easy to manually splice together 4 or 9 grabs and maybe many more (I believe later versions of PsP can handle images of at least 100k x 100k pixels). If your monitor isn't very large, you may be able to send the video to an HDTV (1920 x 1080 pixels) to reduce the number of grabs.

The procedure I use is:

"Print Screen" : then in PsP "Paste as new image" : "Enlarge canvas" (for the first screenshot). Then zoom in to a degree where the image is recognisable at pixel level and move an edge (where you plan to add the next image) near to the centre of the screen.

Then for each subsequent grab, "Print screen" : [ If necessary, "Paste as new image" : Crop as required : "Copy" ] : "Paste as new selection" into the first image window and drag to align the map detail. If it doesn't align perfectly you can probably "Undo" and try again.

I find this process much quicker than calibrating individual map sections (unless they have a very closely-spaced Reference Grid overlay).

Cheers, Alan.

Yes - like an old version of Photoshop Elements (I've got one too, and was interested to learn from this topic that it will open PDFs!)

I'm not too sure about using Print Screen in a project like this - the trouble with it is that you get the entire screen including lots you don't want and so have to crop every image before you can use it. A "proper" print screen utility allows you to get precisely as much of the screen as you want. And very usefully, it will save all of your grabbed images to your hard disk in a file format suitable for use in the next stage in the process.

Bertie

Hi,

I'm puzzled by this comment, or can the screen grabber pretend to have a much higher resolution than the actual screen? The trial .PDF I downloaded (of the 1:25k map) contained at least 30 one km squares and viewed at 200% (to give optimum screen to PDF pixel mapping) filled my PC screen almost 4 times. To give a comparable pixel resolution, I think the interactive map needs to be zoomed two levels down from maximum and this displays only 3 - 6 one km squares (on my screen).

Yes, it does appear to be UTM but "UTM on NAD27" not WGS84. Also, for MM you need to prefix the Northing with a 5 (corresponding to square "T") and the (Easting) Zone is 32. Since the maps have a 1km grid overlay (like OS maps), even manual calibration should be fairly straightforward.

Cheers, Alan.

Alan - you might well be!

When I did a trial run last night, the map extract in the PDF was feebly small. When I tried again just now, the map extract was quite reasonable - and much larger than anything you could get using the screen grab technique I had suggested. With apologies for setting a hare running, perhaps readers could ignore my Monday posting?

Bertie