[Expo-tech] slippy map & prospecting - proposed deletion

[Wookey]

On 2021-04-16 20:08 +0100, Philip Sargent [Gmail] wrote:
> Since Wookey's 'slippy map'
> http://expo.survex.com/map/map.html
> is working:
>  -  yellow spots for entrances (mouse-over to see entrance name) from
> essentials2019.gpx
>  -  green lines for  - kataster boundaries and 
>                      - for GPS tracks of main walking paths

OK, that's great (having the boundaries and paths on is very cool), but, some comments:
* The yellow is pretty hard to see (could be impossible in sunshine?)
* How does 'mouseover' work on a phone? Labels, switchable.
* It would be great to distinguish between major and minor entrances, and especially
  'documentation incomplete', which is what the prospecting guide was for
* Different colour for katasater boundary and path would also be nice.
* this is probably also the best place to display the 'prospecting GPS tracks' that show coverage.
  (not in the cave dataset - that's the wrong place IMNSHO)

* Once we have all that there will immediately be demands to connect
  it to a reporting/recording mechanism (which is indeed a very good
  idea and we should try to at least prototype something this year)

> *I propose to entirely delete* AERW's 'prospecting map' code. 
>  (about 220 lines of complicated rescaling numbers)
> 
> which, very slowly, used to overlap entrance labels on top of
> http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/location_maps/pguidemap.jpg  - which was
> the best we had 20 years ago,
> but is horrible by today's standards. 

It is quite broken, (and designed to work with the old CAVETAB.CSV - I
don't think it ever got updated to the XML-files version?), but the one
thing it still has theoretical ulity for is being printed out. That
was what it was intended to be used for: as part of the prospecting guide.

I guess the printed guide is very nearly defunct and we can assume at
least every group (if not every person) has a phone, but we shouldn't
assume (working) data, so I do think we still need a way someone can take the
map with them, either by paper or phone.

I agree that's probably best done by having a 'print-friendly' view of
the slippy map or a way of generating snapshots of it, but the
prospecting guide does have things on that we can't get any other way
yet (like 'large-area' locations).

A bit of effort working out how to keep the functionality of
'uncertain locations', 'printed map' and 'offline map' would be
worthwhile. The prospecting guide map does get a bit more useless every
year now that we can't update it. If you've made it so that it does
update again then I'd be inclined to keep it until the above functions
are replaced, and I'm not sure we are there yet.

> [The deleted code will still be in the version control system of course.]
> 
> Wookey's map may not be perfect, but it's already better than AERW's code -
> which is semi-moribund due to software library update glitches (I just spent
> far too long trying to fix it).
> 
> This gorgeous 2015 map could do with an update ? Who did that ? And where
> did the contour map come from ?
> http://expo.survex.com/expofiles/location_maps/Expo%202015%20Poster%20Overvi
> ewNorth.pdf

That was Mike Futrell. But all done in arcgis, so not
reproducible. Nat Dalton has done somthing similar in Qgis, and we
should automate his process so we can have pretty _and_ updatable
maps.

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wookware.org/pipermail/expo-tech/attachments/20210416/a07aa103/attachment.sig>