off topic: earth.google.com

Sat Jul 23 17:34:31 PDT 2005

Bob,
As long as you have it reprojected already then you should be good to go. Just 
write a simple routine that writes the xml and put the coordinates in the 
appropriate places. Like SVG you can reference display styles so just put 
those at the start of the document and then you can make your lines and 
points appear as you want them displayed. You could probably knock out a real 
nice writer for your drawings in a day.

Not exactly on the subject but you said you have used Mapserver and Proj4 from 
within Acad before? Can you programatically pass variables between Lisp and 
Proj4 (or Mapserver) to convert points then use those converted points within 
the Lisp routine that passed them to Proj4? Or does it require a user to read 
the output from Proj4/Mapserver and then use/enter those converted values? I 
had always thought that AutoLisp had to communicate with C programs via 
resbuf linked list structures if you wanted to use the variable again once 
the C routine was done with it. Is this not the case? I haven't done much 
Lisp <-> C cross application programming. 

In kind of a roundabout way using Map5 to reproject is interesting because 
Map5 uses FMEObjects to do file transformations and FMEObjects uses a lot of 
the code from Gdal/Ogr. I wonder if behind the scenes it's already using 
Proj4 in a very round about way.
Andy

On Saturday 23 July 2005 16:12, Blammo wrote:
> Andy Canfield wrote:
> >Bob,
> >	I did it using the OpenDesign libraries and C++ but it would be very easy
> > to do from Lisp as well. I have used Lisp in the past to write HTML and
> > SVG markups of drawing files. The hard part with Lisp would be
> > re-projecting the data from whatever you map in to WGS84.
>
> I have AutoCAD MAP and reproject ahead of time, before KML conversion.
>
> > We map in UTM because a single
> >network can span multiple states so state plane doesn't work for us. I
> > wrote a Lat/Lon <-> UTM library for C++ which is what I use. At the time
> > I was unaware of Proj4 which had I known about it I would have just used
> > that vice writting my own. You could always write a quick Arx that wraps
> > simple coordinate conversions from Proj4
>
> I've used proj4 from the comandline in the past as well.
>
> > and exposes them to Lisp for whatever
> >projection you map in if you were serious about wanting to do this on a
> >continuous basis. You would just have to be sure you ran an appload for
> > your custom arx before you started your Lisp routine.
>
> Actually I ran it with appstart from LISP, I've done the same with
> Mapserver as a matter of fact, running Mapserver from inside of AutoCAD.
>
> > After that it's just List
> >and String processing which which Lisp rocks at doing. You probably
> > wouldn't even have to use any V-Lisp to accomplish it just plain old
> > AutoLisp should work just fine.
> >Andy
>
> I was kinda hoping you had used lisp. I've never gone beyond LISP
> programming myself from inside of AutoCAD.
>
> bobb
>
> >On Saturday 23 July 2005 11:38, Blammo wrote:
> >>Andy Canfield wrote:
> >>>I wrote a simple writer the other day to translate all my companies
> >>>relevan= t
> >>>telecom design from AutoCAD DWG's into kml format which is what
> >>>Keyhole(Google Earth) uses. The file spec is
> >>>here:http://www.keyhole.com/kml/kml_doc.html
> >>>It reminds me a lot of SVG without all the weird path stuff you have to
> >>>dea= l
> >>>with in SVG.
> >>
> >>Did you use AutoLISP to do the translation or ???  I would be interested
> >>in doing something similar with our data as well, which is mostly
> >>AutoCAD based.
> >>
> >>bobb
> >>
> >>>It's mostly a display format and there isn't a real good way t=
> >>>o
> >>>store much information so that the user can access it. Basically what
> >>> you display on the screen in the form of labels or the little blurb you
> >>> can put in as a description is about it. So writing a translator isn't
> >>> hard you jus= t
> >>>bring the geometries over. Everything must be in WGS84 or it won't
> >>> display correctly. Also you will have to break your data sets up if you
> >>> have large ones because it gets really, really, really slow as it seems
> >>> to have to par= se
> >>>the entire xml document in order to load it. Which is weird because they
> >>>buffer the imagery as it comes in but they have to parse the entire
> >>>documen= t
> >>>before they can load the geometry rather than draw it as it parses.
> >>> Double buffering would be even better but it seems like everything in
> >>> the interfac= e
> >>>other than the Satellite imagery was put in as an after thought. I put
> >>>1,40= 0
> >>>boundaries into it and that dataset usually takes a second or two to
> >>> load into MapInfo or ArcGIS takes 15 to 30 seconds to load into
> >>> Keyhole. Just fo= r
> >>>fun I tried loading in 650,000 polylines that are aerial data routes in
> >>> an eleven county area and that took 45 plus minutes to load on a dual
> >>> Zeon processor machine. So definitely break up your data sets and let
> >>> the users load them when they need them vice making seamless data sets.
> >>> On Monday if anyone is interested I can put up some screen shots of
> >>> what a telecom(VoIP and HSI) network loaded into Keyhole looks like.
> >>>Thanks,
> >>>Andy
> >>>
> >>>On Saturday 23 July 2005 00:39, Daniele Margotti wrote:
> >>>>You said:
> >>>>9. You can overlay data (vectors and raster) from your computer.
> >>>>10. You can connect to web data sources (like WMS with about 10 lines
> >>>> of server-based scripting).
> >>>>
> >>>>So, how can overlay data? Can I overlay a shape file? How can I define
> >>>>colour, labels, and so on (as in a Mapserver mapfile)?
> >>>>
> >>>>And how can I connect to a web data source like WMS?
> >>>>I have a webserver with Mapserver configured for WMS/WFS requests, how
> >>>>can I tell Google Earth to connect to my Mapserver?
> >>>>
> >>>>     Daniele
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>-----Original Message-----
> >>>>From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU]
> >>>> On Behalf Of Brent Fraser
> >>>>Sent: Friday, July 22, 2005 4:58 PM
> >>>>To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> >>>>Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] off topic: earth.google.com
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>Flavio,
> >>>>
> >>>> Google Earth (not to be confused with Google Maps) is more than just
> >>>>mind blowing.  In my business (Satellite imagery sales and service)
> >>>> it's world shaking.
> >>>>
> >>>>The top ten things I like about Google Earth:
> >>>>
> >>>>1. It's free, with upgrades for a fee.
> >>>>2. The entire world (almost) is covered with pan-sharpened Landsat (15m
> >>>>pixels).  3. All (most?, some?) of Digital Globe's Quickbird imagery is
> >>>>shown (0.6m pixels).  4. The user-interface is dead simple.  5. The
> >>>>fade-in/fade-out of vectors and annotation on zooming is great.  6. The
> >>>>performance fantastic (like streaming video).  7. It's 3d. You can tilt
> >>>>the world and fly thought canyons.  8. It's even more 3d. It will
> >>>> render 3d objects such as buildings.  9. You can overlay data (vectors
> >>>> and raster) from your computer. 10. You can connect to web data
> >>>> sources (like WMS with about 10 lines of server-based scripting).
> >>>>
> >>>>The application: http://earth.google.com (after install, do View ->
> >>>> Play Tour)
> >>>>The community: http://bbs.keyhole.com
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>Brent Fraser
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>----- Original Message -----
> >>>>From: "Flavio Hendry" <flavio at TYDAC.CH>
> >>>>To: <MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU>
> >>>>Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 11:55 PM
> >>>>Subject: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] off topic: earth.google.com
> >>>>
> >>>>>hi all
> >>>>>
> >>>>>as google is obviously a hot issue, have a look at
> >>>>
> >>>>http://earth.google.com/.
> >>>>
> >>>>>just mindblowing.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>Mit freundlichem Gruss / Best Regards
> >>>>>Flavio Hendry
> >>>>>
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