Wondering if someone here can put me on the right path to finding research, algorithms or open source software for serving tiles that aren't geographic in nature. I suppose I'm also interested in client side software that exposes the titles to web users.
Everything I've found seems to be tightly coupled with mapping. However, it seems like there are other potential applications based on the same technology. For example, I have a huge photograph I want to break into tiles and allow for zooming and panning similar to Google Maps.
Why do you want something that isn't geographic in nature? A tiled view is a tiled view.
A colleague of mine programmed MagickTiler, which basically works with every image. You can view the files using OpenZoom or other tile viewers.
MagickTiler is a Java library and utility for converting image files into formats suitable for publishing them as high-resolution, zoomable Web images.
MagickTiler also includes options for batch processing and quality control, supports a wide range of image input formats and the following output formats:
TMS tileset
Zoomify tileset
Google Maps tileset
Pyramid TIFF (PTIF)
Try these softwares to make the tiles on server side:
GeoServer
MapServer
GeoMedia WebMap
Basically, these softwares get information from some database(including images) and build the tiles. To make the controls on client side like google maps you can use openlayers that is a javascript library.
Related
When I was developing for realtors, we referred to a service that would photograph the inside of a listed property, run overlapping images through their process, and produce a '3d tour' of the property, where Joe public viewing the listing could experience the images as if they were inside the property, using their mouse to rotate their viewpoint fully 360 degrees in two planes. Here is an example of such a Virtual Tour service.
I would like to develop a similar application, but less detailed, and using less real imagery in favour of textures and artificial, injected imagery, to allow the placement of posters, menus etc. inside the model of the venue, on walls etc. I suspect using a 3D gaming engine here would give me more control of the content than the total virtual tour type setup, but I need to be able to fairly easily create a large surface texture, such as a wall, from a photo of that wall.
Where do I start if I want to enable my web portal to offer such modelling for my clients, in my ASP.NET MVC3 application? I know I'll be making extensive use here of third party libraries, but I would prefer recommendations on those that don't offer a total solution, just the tools to for me to assemble a total solution.
Unity3d (unity3d.com) is an affordable but powerful game engine that might be a good fit for you for these reasons:
It offers a web plugin so you could host it via your mvc project and inject data into it from your mvc controllers when pages are requested.
Its native language is C#, so the virtual tour/game engine parts of your project will be in the same language as the mvc backend (and presumably other parts of your ecosystem).
It is capable of stunning visual quality with features such as its "Beast" light mapping engine. Rendering virtual venues should be a home run.
You can use your photos as textures easily.
They have a free trial and an active community at forum.unity3d.com, so give it a look.
Is it possible to get cloudmade map tiles in English for area which are not in English by default?
For now it's not possible, but we will add multilangual support for CloudMade map styles in future.
Although you can customise some aspects of CloudMade's map tile rendering using their "style editor" tool, language options are not (yet) available
For efforts to achieve this within the wider OpenStreetMap community (rendering using the names data which is in the OpenStreetMap database for many place names) see the information on Map internationalization.
You can point to tile sources other than CloudMade's using the leaflet library, but note that serving map tiles is a little resource intensive so pointing your leaflet library at someone else's tile server for a high traffic website may not be welcome (terms of use & service guarantees vary)
i need of simple UsA map in flex ,all Area need to be click able as button .
Is there any tool available for designing buttons in various shape in flex or any build in free map is available in flex.
As vector format so that zoom in will not affect the quality.
i need to design like as shown in this site
http://www.futurevision.com.ua/products/usa_flash_map.php
This is the Degrafa Map Demo. It is still in the samples section so perhaps the site was down at the time.
data viz sample page here:: http://www.degrafa.org/samples/data-visualization.html
Load the "Map Dashboard" sample and Right click/View source to get at the code.
Cheers
Jason.
I posted a similar question a while ago but needed more customization.
I used SVG path data in Degrafa to create custom maps of the world, continents, USA.. for a customer. Degrafa used to have a nice US map demo (with source code) as part of its samples, but it disappeared from the web. I don't know of any tool that would help to design clickable Flex shapes. I have no doubt though that Degrafa will provide more support and tools for converting and using SVG.
Some products I found: ilog, ArcGis
And also found this open-source library : GeoVis (birdeye)
But it's very unstable and haven't seen many changes recently.
I'll do that (or, I'll have a designer to do that) in illustrator, and then import the vector format in flex, with the [Embed] metadata.
I don't know if it is a downside for you (for me is a plus), but in this way you have to do everything in code, not with the FlexBuilder UI.
I want to create reports that can be drilled down by the readers - but the reports have to be PDF. I have two options:
Link from the PDF to an online report tool
Make the reports themselves interactive
I like #2...
I believe I can do this with Adobe AIR (Flex, Flash + Adobe Reader 9 or higher).
There are tools that can create PDF documents programatically (AIR?, AlivePDF)
There are frameworks in Adboe that are ideal for reports and charts (Flex)
And PDF documents can contain flash content (Adobe Reader 9+)
My questions are:
If I have an interactive Flash component in a PDF document and I go to print, what will print? Will the current view of he Flash print?
If I want to drill down, all the data has to be in the PDF document (it has to be stand alone). This is fine... but how to do I put the data in the PDF programatically? Is this done with Flex and AlivePDF?
I saw an online sample of an interactive charting report in a PDF document, but now I can't find it. :( I would love to find something again if you know of one.
I feel that I may have all the pieces, but not understanding correctly how they all go together. Any ideas?
Answer to question 3: Currently AlivePDF does not allow you to embed Flash content into a generated PDF. The generated PDFs can include text, images, simple graphics, and certain non-visual features such as bookmarks.
PDF's have JavaScript as a native control language now. With it, you can embed "links" that jump to other pages, etc.
Theoretically, you can call web services from within a PDF using JS and process the responses, perhaps even dynamically filling page areas.
BUT
PDF's are good for providing a document that looks and prints the same everywhere. They are also good for fill-in forms. They are NOT built for "drill-down" on the client side. Can you check the goals of the project to see why they want dynamic PDF's ? If they want portability (i.e. without a web connection), perhaps you can give them what they want with an AIR application and an XML file.
Cheers
we developed interactive content reports for PDF/flashpaper/etc using flex as a front-end but handle the actual report creation server-side using coldfusion's cfdocument/cfpdf (or Itext if we really need insane levels of placement/control/etc.). basically the user chooses the content & the cf app on the backend lays it out & sends back the report.
Does anyone think it is possible to build a Google Docs style PDF document viewer, which will convert a document to a format that doesn't require Adobe Reader on the client machine?
If so, any references to point to? Either a place that had done it, or an explanation of how to do it.
I've done a lot of research regarding this matter and I hope I can help.
Good old Macromedia used to market Flash Paper, which was supposed to be a PDF Adobe Reader killer as it allowed any webmaster to embed and display PDF docs online using Flash. But that was before they sold out to Adobe and Flash Paper was soon put on a shelf and forgotten in favor of Adobe's priorities.
However, Today there are a so many ground-breaking alternatives...
As a user has mentioned above you can use Scribd.com (the wanna-be YouTube for documents). But they're not the only service (and certainly not the ones most ahead of the curve).
Here are my two favorites:
Issuu (http://www.issuu.com)
Mygazines (http://www.mygazines.com/)
I enjoy Mygazines's flash user interface the most (it's also faster) but it costs $99. It's pretty impressive. Depending on what you want to do that price tag can be worth it.
Issuu however, has won me over recently with their Smartlook Platform: http://issuu.com/smartlook
Here's a sample of Smartlook setup on a website:
http://www.ismartlook.com/
Plus it's completely free, which is nice.
A third alternative, which I've considered using myself is this free and open source code made by this guy named samurajdata. He calls it psview (PostScript Viewer). Anyone can download the source code and see it in action here:
http://view.samurajdata.se/
The converted PDFs losses quality as it converts to image fie, but it's fast and easy to setup.
I hope this helps!
You may try Doconut.com looks pretty same as Google Docs viewer. It is available for asp.net 4.0, apart from PDF it can also show all office formats, tiff, dwg, psd etc.. However it is a paid library.
If I understand you correctly you only want to view these files and not edit them.
Google already makes a best effort at providing PDF files found in it's search results as HTML. This doesn't always work. You can try it out by setting up a gmail account, mailing all your PDF files to it, and then using all the "View attachment as HTML" links in the messages.
Your other options are to take the source material and make it into HTML as say LaTeX2HTML does for LaTeX documents, or to convert the PDF into one of: a raster image (tiff, DjVu, etc), or a vector image (PostScript, SVG, SWF).
If the input to this process starts with the PDF files, you have very limited options, especially if the contents of the PDFs are just raster images (say scanned pages).
Personally I'd advocate for creating the PDFs from their source and trying to use Flash Paper to create an SWF out of them too as Flash Paper will pretend to be a printer. Because some 98% of browsers have Flash 9 or greater.
Have you seen Scribd?
You can just use the Google Docs Viewer which also supports PDF documents. It allows you to embed it in your web page and point to the URL where the PDF is located (which doesn't have to be on the Google servers).
Example:
http://docs.google.com/viewer?embedded=true&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.domain.com%2Fdocument.pdf
There is the Internet Archive BookReader available. It's a nice book viewer implemented in javascript (jQuery), so the client doesn't need a PDF reader nor Flash. Though it needs images for the book pages, you can easily connect it to your own image server, so you may try to convert a PDF to images via ASP.NET (or any other tool like XPDF). I found that this is simpler to implement than actually implementing an images viewer.
Also, it seems to support search highlighting (try it here), but I haven't investigated exactly which metadata are needed and in what format.
The last release file contains a simple example on how to use it. More details and examples can be found in the first link.
Try converting them from PDF to TIFF. Tiff supports multiple pages and is widely supported.
If formatting isn't that important, and your PDFs are structured right (ie actually contain text, not images of text), an alternate could be to convert to HTML. The tools from Aspose are pretty good.
I'm wondering why you would want to do that. PDF is such a general and widely supported format that if you try to avoid it you're limited to:
A more obscure or less well supported format (dvi, svg until it gets better support)
Converting to text/HTML like Google does with less than perfect results
Converting to an image format like TIFF which bumps up file sizes and removes all the niceties of PDF like real, selectable text and hyperlinks
If you don't want your users to have to install Adobe Reader (understandable), there are many free lightweight PDF viewers available (Foxit Reader for example), I'm sure many of these have browser embedding capabilities.
Am I missing something here? Google Docs DOES support PDF. Simply upload the PDF file.
Some other alternatives depending upon what you're looking to do:
RAD PDF - ASP.NET component for displaying PDF documents, forms, etc. Also allows PDF searching, bookmarks, text selection, and basic editing.
Atalasoft - ASP.NET component for image viewing, but also allows PDF use as an image. Doesn't support any PDF features beyond simple viewing.