EuroOffice Map Tools

About EuroOffice Map Tools

EuroOffice Map Tools is a map database editor for EuroOffice Map Chart Professional.

The following features are supported:

• Load and save map databases.
• Add and remove geographic levels or change the order of the levels.
• Set the internal ID, and the parent of regions. (These settings have subtle effects.)
• Change the set of names that a region can be addressed by.
• Import an SVG drawing or a Shapefile as a geographic level. (There is no actual polygon editing functionality in EuroOffice Map Tools, but you can edit the SVG or Shapefile and import it.)

For SVG editing we recommend the excellent open-source Inkscape application.

Structure of a map database

Technical details

(This section is aimed at power-users and developers. These details are not relevant to everyday usage.)

A EuroOffice map database file is a Zip archive. Contained within are binary polygon description files (*.poly), localization files for metadata and level names (*.properties), and an XML file describing the hierarchical structure of the map database (structure.xml).

In polygon files the first four bytes are the little-endian representation of a 32-bit signed integer, which is the number of coordinates contained in the file. The number of points in the polygon is the half of this number. Coordinates are then represented by little-endian 64-bit IEEE double-precision floating point numbers.

High level structure

A map database is made up of geographical levels. The levels themselves are made up of regions. And regions are made up of polygons.

EuroOffice Map Tools allows you to select regions with the mouse. You can then edit the metadata associated with the region. This includes the internal ID of the region, the parent ID of the region and the recognized names of the region. The internal ID has to be unique. The parent ID is an internal ID corresponding to a region in a higher level. It may be left empty. The list of recognized names is an arbitrary list of strings. When the map is used in EuroOffice Map Chart Professional, the user only uses the recognized names. Two different regions may in some cases share a recognized name. In this situation the parent ID may make it possible to disambiguate. One example is when there are regions of France and Switzerland with the same name. If the user is creating a map of France, then EuroOffice Map Chart Professional can automatically use the French region and forget about the Swiss. The parent ID is not currently used for other purposes.

Levels are ordered in a list. EuroOffice Map Tools allows you to change this order (with the "^" and "v" buttons), add a new level (with the "+" button) or delete a level (with the "-" button). If you have selected a level (by clicking on its name in the list), its name can be changed with the "Edit name of geographic level..." option in the "Edit" menu. The contents of the selected level can be replaced with the polygons in an SVG file or a Shapefile by clicking on the "Import" button. When an SVG file is imported, the internal ID's of the regions are taken from the id attribute of the source shape. If the shape has a parent attribute, it is also recognized. If the shape has a names attribute, it has to be a semicolon (;) delimited list of recognized names. This way you can use your SVG editing application to prepare the file for easy importing.

Keep in mind, that EuroOffice Map Chart databases only contain polygons made up of straight lines. An SVG file can easily represent curves by storing the positions of a few control points, but such shapes will be converted to a possibly large number of line segments when saved as a Map Chart database. The conversion favors quality over file size. If you want to control the conversion, convert your shapes to straight line segments in your SVG editor before importing in EuroOffice Map Tools.

The localized strings and general metadata for the map database can be edited using the "Edit" menu. Note that the unlocalized database name is used to identify the map database in EuroOffice Map Chart. The installed map databases are all required to have different database names.

Starting the application

EuroOffice Map Tools is a stand-alone Java application. It requires Java 6. Many computers already have Java 6 installed, but it can also be downloaded from www.java.com. If Java is correctly installed, often it is possible to execute the EuroOfficeMapTools.jar file by double-clicking on it. If this is not the case, you can always start it from the command line with

java -jar EuroOfficeMapTools.jar

When starting it from the command line it is possible to set the maximal amount of memory to be used. The default setting depends on your system configuration, but it may be too little for loading large map databases.

To change the maximum to 1GB use the command line

java -Xmx1024M -jar EuroOfficeMapTools.jar

Using the application

The map view can be navigated using the following keyboard-mouse combinations:

• click select region
• shift-left-click-drag or arrow keys pan view
• shift-right-click-drag or ctrl-I and ctrl-O zoom in/out
• ctrl-right-click-drag rotate view
• ctrl-left-click-drag zoom to part of map
• ctrl-shift-right-click reset view

The regions are semi-randomly colored for easy identification, but the colors have no actual effect on the map database.

When the program is started, an empty map database is created. It has no geographic levels, so if you are creating a new map database, you first have to add new geographical levels. When a level is added, it is empty. You have to import its contents from an SVG file or a Shapefile. Then you can check to make sure if the regions all have ID's and recognized names. At last you have to make sure that the database has a name. You can set it from the "Edit" menu. Once the name is set, save the database with the extension ".mapdb".

To install a new map database, you have to find the installation folder of EuroOffice Map Chart Professional (you can not install new databases in the free version). On Windows XP it is "C:\Documents and Settings\your user name\Application Data\OpenOffice.org2\user\uno_packages\cache\uno_packages\random folder name\EuroOffice_Map_Chart_Professional.oxt\". This folder includes a "data" folder, and this is where the ".mapdb" files are kept. Just copy the new database to this folder, restart OpenOffice.org, and the new database will be available for use.

Since it is possible to export geographic layers (using the "Export" button) to SVG, a new database does not have to be created from scratch. You can open one of the databases included with EuroOffice Map Chart or EuroOffice Map Chart Professional, export layers from them and use them as a basis for creating new layers. It allows you to correctly match new regions to the existing map, and since the exported regions also retain their ID's, recognizable names and parent attributes, you can also just manipulate them and import them back.

A few example uses include adding a new layer with circles over your manufacturing plants, cropping the map to only include a part of Europe or changing the projection.

Download

Download EuroOffice Map Tools