With the coastline and water issues, creating a mapsforge map is not as simple as it should be, but here we offer a scripted solution that includes these additional steps.
Mapsforge uses the process described here to build maps for the download.mapsforge.org site. The process is run on a Linux machine with 8 cores, 24GB memory and 2TB of storage. The process has not been tested on any other operating system, running this on Windows or OSX will most likely require some changes.
- Clone mapsforge-mapcreator
git clone https://github.com/mapsforge/mapsforge-mapcreator.git - In the directory xml you will find an example configuration file, named example-config. You will need to edit this file to suit your installation and your map requirements.
- You will also need polygons for any area you want to build a map for. The polygons are found in the polygons directory.
- Run
python mapcreator.py -c xml/myconfigfile.xml
The configuration file has a number of settings and path specifications in the top, adjust them to your environment:
xsi:schemaLocation="http://mapsforge.org/mapcreator mapcreator.xsd " default-map-start-zoom="14" map-staging-path="maps"
pbf-staging-path="data" polygons-path="polygons" map-target-path="/web/ftp.mapsforge.org/public/maps" logging-path="logs" initial-source-pbf="planet.osm.pbf"
osmosis-path="/export/local-1/public/mapsforge/preprocessing/bin/osmosis-0.40.1/bin/osmosis"
default-preferred-language="en">```
The second part are the maps to be created. Map definitions look like this:
``<part name="great_britain" create-pbf="true" map-start-lat="51.499266" map-start-lon="-0.124787">
<part name="england" create-map="true" map-start-lat="51.50728" map-start-lon="-0.12766" defines-hierarchy="false">
<part name="greater_london" map-start-lat="51.50728" map-start-lon="-0.12766"/>
</part>
<part name="scotland" map-start-lat="55.94834" map-start-lon="-3.19327"/>
<part name="wales" map-start-lat="51.48353" map-start-lon="-3.18369"></part>
</part>``
A part directive specifies an extract from the original pbf file, from which either only pbf extracts are made or/and maps. For every part for which a map will be created you will need to define a start point that needs to lie within the polygon. Every part requires a correspondingly named polygon in the polygons folder (at the same depth).
These are some of the more important options for each part:
- **name** required and needs to have a matching polygon in the polygons directory.
- **create-map** if a map should be created or simply a pbf extract that can be used for parts of this part (this is a speed issue, extracting everything from a top-level planet can be very slow).
- **create-pbf** if true will create a pbf file that can subsequently be used for parts of this part.
- **type** if set to hd uses less memory, but much slower
- **map-start-zoom** start zoom level
- **map-start-lat**
- **map-start-lon** starting position, must be within polygon
- **preferred-language** if creating maps for non-English environments, will take the language setting in OSM file first.
For all options see https://github.com/mapsforge/mapsforge-mapcreator/blob/master/xml/mapcreator.xsd
Notes
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- This script will not download the initial file, e.g. planet.pbf.
- You will need a working osmosis installation
- You will need the mapsforge writer installed
- If you are making something like a world map, you might consider the zoom-interval-config setting as well as the land-simplification setting, which reduces the number of nodes in the land borders (higher=more simplification).
- It might be worthwhile to first try this process without any changes applied and full planet.pbf file, to rule out any configuration problems.