OSM and gnuplot alive again

Posted by colonia on 27 January 2008 in English.

Spending some time at home on development and maintainance
of some essential OSM-Tools.

Yes, my bike got some problems, light failed, the Sachs-3-Gear
failed and both tyres were in need of some additional air.
This is all fixed now, and i have put a spare ball-pen
in my bag after i have lost my only pencil somewhere
out there in the bush week
(I got a beer and a replacement in the next pub)

Today i have been working on the idea to print OSM-Maps using gnuplot.
This is an important tool because it generates high density maps,
e.g. perfect to check if POI are at the right position or missing
and to draw notes into it.

The old approach
is not functional anymore since OSM 0.5, but that is easily fixable.

I wrote a XSLT-stylesheet
osm2gnuplot.xsl
to extract way- or poi-data from an OSM-Data file,
and a messy script
osm2gnuplot.sh
to call the XSLT-processor.
This script will generate a bunch of files, one each for streets, rails and
different POI. These files are readable by gnuplot, e.g.
example to draw some parts of cologne

Note: this is not the fastest/most efficient approach.
Doing this with a well indexed database would be a matter of seconds,
doing this with my stylesheet and the gnome-xsltproc is a matter of hours
for the complete map of cologne (ca. 5MB) on a 400MHz PII-Box.
But its working fine
take a look at the north-east from cologne: osm-cologne-ne-20080127.ps.gz