Posted by
MichaelRaz on
URL: http://maprun.308.s1.nabble.com/Creating-an-Event-file-with-Atlogis-tp854p860.html
Hi Ken,
I'm not 100% sure what you are trying to do (and there is also likely a terminology issue causing some confusion). As Peter has suggested, I would put MapRun more in the area of a club tool because it is focused on primarily the punching aspect of events/courses (replacing/augmenting other methods such as SI) although there is the grey area and lots of things an individual can do depending on the aim. For a club event the mapping and course setting are the major activities that, depending on the level (and desire to meet standards) is time consuming (and can be expensive - mapping especially). I am neither a mapper nor a qualified course setter (although I do a bit of both). If I do set courses I get them approved by a qualified person, not only to make them better but to meet our insurance requirements. In general, my approach is to make courses (or have others make courses) their "normal" way and then convert the parts to MapRun. The advantage to this is I don't have to get a bunch of people to change the way they have been doing things for years, only advise them on adjustments that are better suited to a GPS punching system.
Although my club has licenses for OCAD, CONDES and more, there are decent free tools available depending on what aspect of the process you are trying to do.
For developing maps a favourite is Open Orienteering
https://www.openorienteering.org/ not to be confused with the online openorienteeringmap
https://oomap.co.uk/global/#/new/streeto_global/4/-0.1000/51.1000/ that is great for really quick urban maps based strictly off openmap sources. The former provides some good map making tools can read/write ocad files.
For course setting my goto free software is PurplePen
https://purplepen.golde.org/ which can use OCAD, image files and other sources as the base map and has decent course setting tools as well as basic map adjustment tools. it works really well with the OpenOrienteering package.
Obviously lots of other free general GIS software out there (QGIS) but generally much more complicated and not focused on Orienteering.
My issues always seem to be with changing coordinate systems although I am learning.
Non of this helps directly with MapRunf. Some of the tools will directly export into KMZ or KML format (map, course) but many do not and require some conversion. Peter's comment about getting to know the KML and KMZ formats using a basic text editor is so important (I use Notepad++). Add a good archive package such as 7Zip, you can work directly in the KMZ file as this is just a KML file (providing the geo data for the map image) and a folder with an image map file (or a bunch if tiled). KML (and KMZ) provide the standard to contain the data but various software will lay things out in very different ways. I would suggest that MapRunF has been designed to expect the contents in the format that is most used by the various orienteering software packages. For example, a KMZ from OCAD is great but I have produced a KMZ from another geo product (not orienteering related) and the resulting KMZ was not compatible without a lot of changes with MapRunF (although a perfectly acceptable KMZ for Google Earth). Example - Google allows 2 (or more?) ways to georeference the image in a KMZ and only one works with MapRunF.
Make sure you are familiar with the tools at
http://www.p.fne.com.au/rg/cgi-bin/o-utils.cgi as these will allow you to do things like convert a course XML file to KML. As you are likely discovering there are also a growing list of other utilities specifically to handle MapRunF requirements. I wrote my own small application to do a bunch of stuff that best suited my work process - not hard in my case as I had a lot of the code done for setting up Routegadget for club events.
I do think your job is going to be much harder if you cannot get Google Earth running on your computer (I don't see a large memory use or CPU use with it. Not sure about the web version Peter suggested.). It provides an easy way to validate control locations, make changes etc. I also use it often to produce the KMZ from plain image maps I need to work with. Although this can be a frustrating experience when the original map was not accurate, it gets the job done. It helps that our club works with paper maps and people are encouraged not to use the phone map anyway.
Enough babbling - hopefully some of this will be useful.
Michael