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Supporting Oomap
Running Oomap costs real money for the hardware and running costs, and developing. maintaining and supporting Oomap costs real time. Oomap has always been, and will continue to be, free but users often want to contribute. Until recently all these costs were incurred by Oomap’s founder, Oliver O’Brien. More recently, I have taken on the…
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Sorting out symbol alignment
Oomap uses mapnik to produce its maps, and its maps are invariably orientated with True North up. Therefore all the area symbols, labels and so on are orientated the same way, and it’s very difficult to change. That’s fine, until you want an orienteering map that’s aligned to magnetic North, and you live somewhere where…
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Additions to the PseudO style
Although Oomap is primarily an urban mapping tool, it can be used for more rural areas. However, the symbol set lacks some key features. Based on a few requests, the following new symbols have been added (to just the PseudO style): Scree Orchard Vineyard Forest ride (cutline) – as rough open line Point water feature…
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Some UI tweaks
A few new updates to make things a bit easier: 1. When setting the angle for a control label, the label now updates in real time, so you no longer have to guess where the label will end up. 2. If you double-click on the control number/description on the right-hand control description panel, the map…
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…and increased LIDAR coverage for Wales too
Hot on the heels of England’s LIDAR update, the Welsh Government have released their data from LIDAR surveys in 2020 – 2022. This dataset has a few gaps, in particular some coastal regions, but these were almost entirely covered in their older data. As a result, the combination of old and new LIDAR data gives…
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Increased LIDAR coverage for England
The Environment Agency released their latest composite LIDAR-based digital terrain model for England last week. They state >95% coverage across England but it looks to be complete apart from a circle around Fylingdales in North Yorkshire. I’ve spent the last few days processing this and merging in with the Welsh LIDAR data to generate an…
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Ready for the big time?
This site has been up and running for some time now, however most traffic has been going to Ollie O’Brien’s original site at https://oomap.co.uk A week or so ago, the servers used by Ollie’s site were upgraded, which broke the site. Therefore at least for now, all oomap requests are coming here – and it…
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Out with the old, in with the new
The time has come to retire the 15 year old PC running my oomap instance and replace it with something a bit more modern, more powerful, more efficient and quite a bit smaller. Hopefully you’ll notice some performance improvements, particularly in serving up the contours in the web preview. This was a good opportunity to…
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Smaller PDF files
When you download a PDF map, the mapping nicely fits inside the outer border. It’s not that simple however – the mapping data often extends beyond this border, but is visually clipped so that only the data inside the border is shown. Any external data is still there, but hidden – and takes up space…
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Contour Perfectionism
The current contour generation process queries a database for all the contours in a certain area. It then drops any very short contours as these are likely to be artefacts that aren’t useful, and draws tick marks to show slope direction. To make sure the ticks appear on shorter contours, the frequency of tick marks…