How to convert mbtiles to .osm.pbf - qt

I'm writing a Qt application that is supposed to show a geo-map of a specific geographical region in one of its views on top of which I need to be able to draw various other graphical elements.
The requirements are that all the map-tiles must be pre-downloaded for off-line use as during the use of the application there will be no internet connection.
After lengthy search for a suitable library that I could link into my Qt project that would support my needs (off-line tile loading, rendering and painting the map in Qt framework, non-QML only C++ integration) I thought libOsmScout would do the job.
However, I have managed to download .mbtiles files for my region from OpenMapTiles just to realise that libOsmScout cannot natively work with .mbtiles.
The library can only work (indirectly after "import") with .osm.pbf files.
(http://libosmscout.sourceforge.net/tutorials/importing/)
I've searched extensively the web but all the results were pointing to conversion procedures in the opposite direction, i.e. into the .mbtiles.
So my question is: is it possible to convert .mbtiles files to .osm.pbf format so I can then import it into libOsmScout compatible internal set of files?
If it is possible, what the process?
Any help or guidance would be much appreciated.
Thanks.

Easiest way is to use ogr2ogr to convert to pbf format.
ogr2ogr -f MVT output_dir_name input.mbtiles -dsco MAXZOOM=2
This will create a directory structure with each zoom level having a directory and pbf file named according to the tile position.
Or
using this tool called MBUtil.
There are some steps which you can follow from the github repo.
After that, you can then use the following command to convert to directory structure with each tile in pbf format.
mb-util input.mbtiles output_dir_name image_format=pbf
where tiles is the directory name you want

Related

Writing a custom Qt Location GeoServices plugin to use geo-referenced image file as map source

I'm currently working on a Qt Quick application that will provide a map viewer for a smallish area (1 square KM or so), the map details for which will be provided in a single geo-referenced image file (GeoTIFF, geo-referenced PDF, ESRI Shape file etc.), along with display of current location, operator identified points of interest etc. It's primarily responsibility is the display of custom maps (as opposed to generic maps retrieved from public map image service providers (OSM, MabBox, ESRI etc)), and it will often be used in areas with limited connectivity
An extensive web search has identified others who have made similar enquiries in the past (here, Qt forums etc), and the general suggestions for solutions are as follows:
ArcGIS Runtime with Qt SDK Doesn't work for me as down the track I'm intending to target an embedded linux device using an ARM processor, and ArcGIS doesn't make source available for cross-compilation for arbitrary targets. They've recently produced an Android release, but nothing for ARM linux in general)
QGIS developer libraries GPL licence not compatible with my commercial development
Use the Qt Location Map component with a local tile server or offline tile collection (some plugins have recently introduced support for this) Seems a bit of a hack, as noted I'm primarily using custom maps, as opposed to offline copies of public map server images, and my images won't be big enough to really warrant tiling otherwise
It would be feasible to develop a Qt Quick component from scratch to do this, but given that the existing Qt Location Map component provides a well defined pre-existing front end interface for everything my map would need to do and has an extendable plugin based architecture, writing a custom Qt Location GeoServices plugin seems the most sensible and elegant way forward.
I've started examining the source code of the existing plugins, but can't shake the feeling that in a world containing 8 billion people, with "nothing new under the sun", this would have been done already if it was a good idea....
Would anyone with more familiarity with the Qt Location module care to comment?
Since geo-referenced images can be arbitrarily large, it is the standard to convert them into a tile pyramid, to be able to efficiently display them on any hardware (at the cost of doubling the size, at worst, depending on how many layers you want).
Even if you would write your own geoservice plugin, you most likely will end up (directly or by using 3rd party code) tiling your geotiff.
This said, QtLocation does allow you to use custom tilesets ( http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/location-plugin-osm.html, look for osm.mapping.custom.host) served in most ways (http, https, file, qrc, etc.).
So go ahead, fire up QGis, install the QTiler plugin, and convert your images.
If you need to serve these pictures over the net directly to the clients (thus needing to do the conversion on the client), you can either see what QTiler does, or build up your gdal pipeline (gdal_translate, gdalwarp and gdal2tiles), and ship the relevant gdal bits with your application.
If you need multiple images at the same time, you can either use multiple Plugin elements with different plugin parameters, or you can fork the osm plugin and support multiple custom hosts.
Based upon Paul's response, and a couple of similar responses to the same enquiry on Qt forums and mailing lists, plus my own investigation, I'd conclude the following:
Generating a custom Qt Location GeoServices plugin to directly provide map imagery from a geo-referenced image file would not be a great idea as the implementation would be less than straightforward, and in practice any non-trivial map image would likely be large enough that an initial tiling step, followed by use of one of the standard tiled mapping plugins referencing a local tile set would be more appropriate anyway.

AutoCAD drawing (DWG) to map tiles

Rendering large DWG files as such has shown performance degradation to large extent. Planning to use the concept of map tiles using leaflet. Need some pointers/information on how to convert DWG files to map tiles.
After too many hours, searching everywhere for a solution to convert DWG/DXF files using any automated command line tool, finally I found QCAD.org.
And that works even on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
After a quick look in documentation, I found the section for command line tools.
They are:
dwg2bmp, dwg2png, dwg2jpeg, dwg2tiff, dxf2png, dxf2jpeg, dxf2tiff
and the awesome:
dwg2maptiles and dxf2maptiles
Using this tool, they came up with a beautiful sample using leaflet.js:
http://qcad.org/res/map/
The project is OpenSource, but this scripts are only avaliable at QCAD Professional edition.
You can use the free open source QCAD Community Edition by downloading the trial version for your platform (Win, Mac, Linux) and then remove the QCAD Professional add-on running in trial mode. Alternatively, you may compile your own package from sources.
PS: I'm very happy to support the project buying a professional copy.
The easiest approach may be to save your DWG files as PDF and use MapTiler to create the raster tiles and leaflet viewer for you.
You can render such PDF by drag&drop into MapTiler while choosing the "raster" profile - just follow the video tutorial: https://youtu.be/9iYKmRsGoxg?list=PLGHe6Moaz52PiQd1mO-S9QrCjqSn1v-ay
If you need to assign coordinates for later on placing markers or polygons on specified position over the DWG tiles - it is possible with advanced tiles.
If you need help with using MapTiler - write details and provide sample file you need to process to https://www.maptiler.com/support/community/.
If you data are sensitive or you need a guarantee on the answering of your request you seek directly the support from us, the authors of MapTiler.

Extract Images from Executable Files Using Managed Code (C#/VB)

Can I retrieve bitmap information from an executable using managed code only?
If you simply want to extract the icon, then you can look here: Get File Icon used by Shell
If you want to extract resource images then you should clarify your question to state how they're stored in the executable. Describing how the example exe was created would be useful.

MapBox sqlite layer from OSM

New to MapBox.
I have read the tuto on how to create a layer from OSM which relies on a PostGIS connection. Tried it. So far, so good.
Nonetheless, given the very limited magnitude of the project i'm working on (single user...), i'd really rather avoid having to have a pgsql instance running just for that. sqlite comes across as an option of course!
Can someone help with the following questions:
Any reason why sqlite would not do the job ? The data set i'm pulling from OSM is about 30MB
Any recommandable and tried script to convert OSM .xml or .pbf to .sqlite ? There is a bunch of osm2sqlite out there on github and where-else, but can't see any reference to them that let me think they will still be maintained in a foreseeable future...
How straightforward will it be to link such sqlite output to a tile mill layer ? Clearly, I have no idea on the underlying data model and subsequent sql statement to bring it across...
Many thanks
Laurent
Use mbtiles (this is basically sqlite if you didn't know).
Mbtiles will work perfectly for you. In fact Mapbox uses it for their maps
As you've seen from that link, tilemill can export your project to mbtiles . Personally I would import to postgres using imposm3, it's fairly fast and doesn't use up ask your memory. After importing I'd style the map with tilemill then use it to generate mbtiles.
Seems like you're already comfortable with the first 2 steps of this. The docs cover the exporting step
Never used mbtiles but I can't see why you would have difficulty with them.
Nb In the future you'll be better off asking questions these at gis.stackexchange.com/

Display a .dot file inside a Qt application

I am new to Qt and C++... Now, I am writing an application in Qt, in which I have to display an already generated .dot file inside my application. I tried the render function but did not work for me.. Can anyone out there help me in this regard..
Thanks
Had the same problem using Python. I came up with this solution:
svg_string = dot_graph.create_svg(prog='dot')
svgWidget = QtSvg.QSvgWidget()
svgWidget.load(QtCore.QByteArray(svg_string))
Guess you can do something similar in C++
Plotting directly a dot file requires to be able to display the nodes in the correct positions, and link them properly. This is done by very complicated engines and is not included in the dot file, which is simply a description of the graph. Maybe there are C++/Qt libraries that take dot files as an input, but I don't know them.
According to this topic (Graphviz: How to go from .dot to a graph?), you can easily transform a dot file into a png or svg file. If you want to display the rendered graph into your application, the easiest thing to do is to generate that png picture (from the shell or from your code) and to manipulate it from your program.
Take a look to QGraph. You will need much more work to make your graphs interactive.
Anyway, if you are new to Qt, even the simple display it's a steep introduction to graphics.
I have my own implementation, but I'm sorry it's not yet ready for publishing - I will do in a SWI-Prolog context...

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