Seven scripts in seven days - Day #5

While one use of scripting is to enhance the Editor's built-in functionality, another important use is for interoperability with other programs or services. A number of the scripts are designed to make the Editor interact with Google or Bing map services, or demonstrate how this is done.

MapTiles

MapTiles, also known as WebTiles, is a core technology for web map services (and Google Earth). The technology stores a whole map as a pre-computed image pyramid. Reading a map prepared in this way is very fast because the map has already been pre-rendered.

The MapTiles script creates image pyramids that are compatible with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenLayers. When you publish such a map on one of these services, your map will appear on the top of the Google/Bing content. As usual, a valid coordinate system set-up is required.

Furthermore, this script generates a .ttkwp file, so that the generated map tiles can also be opened in any TatukGIS product as a layer from the hard drive. So, if you have a very large or complicated, but rarely modified, base map, generating it to WebTiles can be a good idea (to achieve top performance).

 

Google Maps - all layers exported

Bing Maps - only vector layer exported