Category: NZ Tekonverse -> NZ Rail Maps Technical

  • Using Qgis Python Scripting in the NZ Rail Maps Project: 3 – Volumes Formatting

    The third area of Qgis scripting for the NZ Rail Maps project is specifically focused on formatting the Volumes layout images and is used to generate a subtitle displayed in the title bar of each Volumes image. This subtitle informs the user of the year of each aerial image view that is part of the…

  • Using Qgis Python Scripting in the NZ Rail Maps Project: 2 – Volumes Creation

    The second and third aspects of Qgis scripting used in the NZ Rail Maps Project are connected with Volume maps creation. In the Volumes website, static map images are used. Each static image is manually composed, by positioning the map in the composer layout window, and combining the selection of different layers, rotation and zoom…

  • Using Qgis Python Scripting in the NZ Rail Maps Project: 1 – WebMaps

    Good evening. As part of the development of the NZ Rail Maps Project, recently custom Python scripting has been incorporated into the main window GUI and Composer / Layout to speed up processing of various aspects. This is summarised in different sections below. In order to create the content of the NZRM WebMaps site, various…

  • Simple PHP Photo Gallery For NZ Rail Maps Volumes Site

    The New Zealand Rail Maps Project aims to create free maps of the present and past national public railway network, which are produced and distributed by a variety of means, through several web sites. One of these is the Volumes site, and it is intended to distribute individual images that each represent a small part…

  • Setting up Apache on Debian

    Apache is a well known webserver that is currently the second most webserver used worldwide. It is only two percent behind nginx at the time of writing, and each has about a third of the webserver market. The remaining third is made up of several products; MS IIS only has a single digit percentage. As…

  • Drawing Outline Rectangles (Boxes) In Gimp

    The designers of Gimp are at pains to tell us it is not a drawing tool. Yet it can convert a selection into an outline. So we can for example draw a rectangular selection and make an outline from it. Outlines are useful in the NZ Rail Maps aerial mosaics, where a lot of pixels…

  • Install mb-util on Debian

    I use a Python script called mb-util to build the mbtiles files for the NZ Rail Maps webmaps site. It takes the raw tiles and builds what is effectively a SQLite database that encapsulates the millions of little tiles into one file, which is much easier to handle for file storage and uploading, although slightly…

  • NZRM Webmaps Development Update 2021-03-17 [2]

    Part 1 of this series took a look at some of the technical history of developing the webmaps project. This part will discuss some of the present and future challenges in the NZ Rail Maps Webmaps. As the initial stage of putting all of NZ online in the webmaps is nearing completion, attention will soon…

  • NZRM Webmaps Development Update 2021-03-17 [1]

    One of the features of this blog is that it includes technical posts about the NZ Rail Maps project with which converser.nz blogs are affiliated. These posts are less suitable for a general audience mainly interested in the map content and so are posted on NZTechonverse instead. The NZ Rail Maps live webmaps project is…

  • NZ Rail Maps: Spatialite vs Geopackage

    In the NZ Rail Maps project, I have preferred in recent years to replace shapefiles with databased formats. When using file based dbms (vs client-server) SQlite stands out as a viable alternative that is extremely well supported with an impeccable reputation. There are a number of SQlite based formats of data for GIS layers. Geopackage…