[FOSS-GPS] FoxtrotGPS Mapping Library

[Oliver Eichler]

> in PostGIS or SpatialLite, etc. But having done all the hard GIS work,
> none of the products (such as geotiffs, or png/world file combinations) can
> easily be used with a GPS software tool.
> 
> At least not one I've looked at...
> 

Depends on what you want. On the PC side there are quite some tools like QGis, Viking or QLandkarte GT that handle raster maps very well.

On the mobile device side it's a bit harder. Most of the applications, just like tango/foxtrot gps, focus on tile servers. Or, as for road navigation, on vector maps. 

I myself asked for geotiff support in FoxtrotGps on IRC, yesterday. My personal idea is to replace QLandkarte M by another application, as I am tired of maintaining it. The answer was: Only tile server / cache support. But: You can partition your large raster map into tiles and use them by that trick. Of course that approach has a few caveats if it comes to zooming.

But speaking of a free mapping library. GDAL does a good job at least on the PC. It's very easy to read raster data from a supported file format. It's not that optimal for mobile devices, because it's generality seems to be in the way for performance optimization. That is no issue on a strong cpu with big memory. But on a small processor with 64M it behaved a bit sluggish. You can try the GDAL approach with QLandarte M on a WinCE device. There are precompiled binaries. 

Thus generally speaking an optimized  FOSS library to read raster maps on mobile devices is kind of missing. It would even be ok if it's focus is just on one format and projection. If that helps to speed up things.

Oliver