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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ClemRutter (talk | contribs) at 15:43, 14 February 2012 (→Creating a KML file: Another hint). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
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Creating an SVG file

This is a tutorial for creating road maps for WP:USRD with Quantum GIS and Inkscape. This tutorial was originally written by Xenon54. Contact him with any questions or inaccuracies.

  1. Install the latest version of Quantum GIS (QGIS). The latest version is currently 1.6.0 Copiapó. These links may not be up-to-date and are merely provided as a convenience; the official download page is here. I (Xenon54) nor any other contributor to this tutorial take responsibility if downloading QGIS results in adverse effects to your computer.
  2. Download Inkscape from inkscape.org. You'll be using it later. (Linux users, check your repos first.)
  3. Now that you've downloaded QGIS, you need to feed it Geographic Information System data, herein referred to as just "data". It is freely available from many government and private sources. Here are some good places to start:
  4. Once you're done downloading data, fire up QGIS. You should get a blank screen.
  5. Go to Layers -> Add a Vector Layer, or press V.
  6. Browse to wherever you saved your data. You should see a .shp file. Double click it to import it. NHS data (state-level) will have a name of the form SXXNHPN, where XX is the state's FIPS state code -- for example, S39NHPN for Ohio. Census/ESRI data, which is county-level, will be named tgrXXXXXabc, where XXXXX is the FIPS state code followed by the FIPS county code and abc is a code indicating which type of data the file represents -- for example, tgr39103wat holds data for water bodies in Medina County, Ohio.
  7. We will be focusing on road data first. Now you should see a mass of lines, roughly forming the state's shape. It is time to give those lines some colour. In the "Legend" on the left hand side, right-click the layer name and hit Properties. Note: this method will only work for NHS data. Census/ESRI street data does not contain sign designation data, only street names. You will have to leave this data all one colour.
  8. Under the Symbology tab, find the drop-down box that is labelled "Legend type". Click it, then hit "Unique Value".
  9. In the "Classification Field" drop-down, select "SIGNT1", then click the Classify button.
  10. A list of letters should appear. The amount is different for each state, but three are always present: "I" for Interstates, "U" for US Routes, and "S" for state highways.
  11. Click each class you want to colour. Click the "Outline Colour" box to the right and assign a colour to the class based on the standards at WP:USRD/MTF. Here you can also change the width and style of the lines in that class. If you don't want a class to appear, select it and hit "Delete Classes". When you are done, click OK. You can also assign a label to the class by typing a name in the Label box.
  12. If you downloaded non-road data, such as water or county lines, go into its Properties now. Leave the "Legend Type" at "Single Symbol", and assign the proper colour. If you're doing county lines, make the line width rather thick (~.8) so it will show up correctly in step 29.
  13. You probably have noticed that the road whose article is getting the map (herein: the "highlighted road") is orange or blue or some other colour. You need to copy that road from the NHS layer to a new layer you will create to turn it red.
  14. There are two ways to select the road:
    Lasso method:
    1. This is only ideal for short roads. On the main toolbar, look for an icon that looks like an arrow with a small "i" next to it. It's next to the pan tool.
    2. Click the arrows next to this icon, and select the icon that looks like an arrow with a box on top of a yellow shape.
    3. Zoom in (click the arrows next to the pan tool to find the zoom tool) to where you can see your road clearly. Hold control and select the road so the region you want to highlight red is coloured yellow. You can switch between pan, zoom, and select, just don't let go of control.
    4. Once you're done selecting, let go of control. Find the blue pen (edit layer) icon, then click the arrows a few icons to the right. Click the "copy selected" icon.
    Attribute table method
    1. Ideal for longer roads, but tough for roads such as the Ohio Turnpike that carry two different non-concurrent designations. Begin by right-clicking the NHS layer and selecting Open Attribute Table.
    2. A bunch of numbers, looking like a nightmare Excel file, appear. However, some of the numbers are very helpful. Scroll over to the SIGN1 column. This is the designation of the road and is a combination of the next two columns, SIGNT1 (type, which you may remember we used in colouring) and SIGNN1 (number). Concurrencies are indicated by additional entries in SIGN2 and SIGN3. To the right of SIGNN3 is LNAME, the name of the road segment being described by that row, followed by MILES and KM, which should be self-explanatory.
    3. Now, notice the search box at the bottom. Type the designation of the road you want to highlight (e.g. S11 for a State Route 11), select SIGN1 in first drop-down box, "show only matching" (or "select and bring to top", or "select", whichever you prefer) in the next drop-down box, then finally click Search.
    4. The matching records (hopefully corresponding to the road you want to highlight) will be selected or move to the top, depending on which option you picked. Select them and hit the "Copy selected rows to Clipboard" icon.
  15. Whichever method you picked, the road you want to highlight should now be yellow. Press N to create a new layer. Under "Type", select "Line". QGIS demands that you define an attribute here. An attribute is a column in the attribute table, such as "SIGN1". It doesn't matter what you call it or what type it is, just define one and click OK.
  16. QGIS asks you to pick a location to save the .shp file. Pick one and save it. The filename will be the name of your layer.
  17. Select the layer in the Legend on the left-hand side. Click the blue pen icon to enter into edit mode. Click the arrows to the right of the blue pen icon but to the left of the hand icon. Click the Paste icon in the box that appears.
  18. Click the blue pen icon to exit edit mode. Save the layer. If you get an "unable to commit changes" error, click don't save. It seems to save anyway.
  19. Finally, right-click the layer you just created. Click Properties, then the Symbology tab. Leave the Legend Type at "Single Symbol". Now, click on the Outline colour box and make the highlighted road red. Be sure to change the width to make it stand out.
  20. At this point, the highlighted road (remember, the road the map is showing the path of) should be red.
  21. Now save: File -> Save Project. This will save the current layers and view as a .qgs file.
  22. Export the map as an file that can be used in Inkscape. To export it as a PNG, go to File -> Save as Image. Pick a place to save the image (preferably one where you'll remember where you saved it) and save as a PNG file. To export it as an SVG, see this page for the remainder of the tutorial.
  23. You're done with QGIS. Open Inkscape.
  24. Open the PNG file you just saved.
  25. Go to Path -> Trace Bitmap. A dialogue box will appear.
  26. Under "Multiple scans", select "Colours". Untick the "Smooth" box. Untick the "Stack scans" box.
  27. Click on the image to select it, then click Update to preview the trace.
  28. If you're satisfied with the preview, click OK and wait for potrace to work its magic.
  29. Once potrace is finished, move the traced image out of the way and delete the PNG. Put the traced image back when you're done. After you do this, right-click on the image and hit Ungroup. Now each colour is a separate path. Interstates are all one path, state and US routes are all one path, but most importantly the highlighted road is its own path. This will make it easier to update the map for alignment changes, extensions, or truncations.
  30. You can add shields if you want. Use the SVG shields found on Commons. Be sure to save the SVGs, then go to File -> Import to add them to the map. If you don't, the thumbnail won't display come upload time.
  31. If you added shields, make sure to convert the shield text to path if necessary. Then, save as an SVG.
  32. You're done with Inkscape. Go to Commons.
  33. Upload your image. Remember to tag with {{Created with Inkscape}} or {{Inkscape-hand}}.
  34. Add your image to the article. Most, if not all, use {{Infobox road}}, which has a map parameter. Add in the form map=map_name where map_name is just the file name of the map (e.g. OHSR 8 map.svg, not File:OHSR 8 map.svg). Text can be displayed with the map_notes parameter.

Congratulations! You are finished!

Creating a KML file

Using qGIS and shapefiles
This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Scott5114.

Having created a map as shown above, creating a KML file to attach to the article is simple. You can think of a KML file as basically a stripped-down version of a shapefile—it contains a set of geographic coordinates that express your route's location. However, while a shapefile encodes the coordinates as binary data, KML is expressed as textual XML data, which is easier to parse and edit. KML files are supported by many mapping applications, such as Google Earth, and can be reused by many people outside the project for a variety of purposes. Online mapping apps like Google Maps and Bing can also read and display KML files, which means that readers can choose to see the route highlighted on a map with towns and cities labeled that they can zoom in on and pan. The utility of generating a KML file is a no-brainer.

  1. You will need to have finished creating a map in QGIS in the manner described above. This walkthrough begins after approximately Step 22 of the above tutorial.
  2. Right-click the layer containing the "highlighted road" (the layer that contains just the road of interest, colored red). Select "Save as...".
  3. A dialog called "Save vector layer as..." should appear. Change the "Format" dropdown to "Keyhole Markup Language [KML]".
  4. Move down to the line labeled "CRS" and click "Browse".
  5. Expand the "Geographic Coordinate Systems" entry on the tree view. Find "WGS 84" and select it. Click "OK". (In the future, you will be able to select WGS 84 from the "Recently used coordinate systems" list.)
  6. Select a location to save the KML file to.
  7. Finally, click OK on the "Save vector layer as..." dialog. QGIS should notify you that the export was completed successfully.
  8. Open the KML you just generated in a text editor such as Notepad, emacs, etc.
  9. Copy all text in the KML file to the clipboard.
  10. Visit the /KML subpage of the applicable article's talk page. (For example, for the article Oklahoma State Highway 84, the KML page will be Talk:Oklahoma State Highway 84/KML.
  11. Paste the KML text into this page and save. Do not attempt to format it; doing so will break the XML. Any wikicode intermingled in the KML page will cause parsing problems. You may wish to note in the edit summary that the KML was generated with the same data as the article's map.
  12. Go to the article and place the {{AttachedKML}} in the article. Good places are the "see also" or "external links" sections.
  13. You're done! Users can now use the KML data.


Using Google Earth
This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Floydian.

The simplest method for most people to create a KML file is using Google Earth, which is free and works on most modern computers.

First time setup
Get Google Earth Ubuntu 11.X tutorial
  1. Start up the software.
  2. In the Tools menu, at the top, select Options... to bring up the Google Earth Options dialog. By default it should be on the 3D View tab. If not, set it to be.
    • In the Mac version, select the Google Earth menu and Preferences...
  3. Under Terrain Quality, set the Elevation Exaggeration to 0; press Ok.
    • This eliminates the surface elevations, making it easier to spot straight lines.
  4. On the left are three collapsible navigation panes: Search, Places and Layers.
  5. Start by unchecking all of boxes in the Layers pane except Borders and Labels and Places.
    • You may optionally wish to use the roads layer, but it can be a hindrance at times.
  6. In the Places pane, on the left, you will see the My Places tree, and Temporary Places. Right-click My Places and Add>Folder in which to save your routes.
Drawing
  1. In the Places pane, right-click the folder you are storing your routes in and select Add>Path to bring up the Google Earth - New Path dialog box.
  2. Name it after your highway
  3. In the Style, Color tab, set the color to pure red (second column, fourth row in the palette or r:255 g:0 b:0) and set the width to 5.0.
  4. Without closing the dialog box, start tracing your line. You may want to drag the dialog box over to the side; it can be annoying.
    • Once the dialog box has lost focus (ie. you click to place your first point on the map), you can use your arrow keys to pan the map.
  5. Create your line, point-by-point.
Exporting
  1. Once you have finished tracing your line, press ok on the dialog box to close it. Your new path should be listed in the Places pane, within your folder.
  2. Right-click that entry (or the line itself on the map), and select Save Place As...
  3. Change the Save as type to Kml (it defaults to .kmz when you start the program).
  4. Save the file
  5. Locate the file on your computer and open it with a plain text editor.
  6. Select all>Copy
  7. Now go to the talk page of the article you're adding it to, and add /KML to the end of the URL (so Talk:Ontario Highway 401 becomes Talk:Ontario Highway 401/KML) - The capitals ARE IMPORTANT!
  8. Paste the content into this new page and save.
  9. Now add {{AttachedKML}} to the article itself, in the External links section if it exists.
  10. Profit.
Observation
This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Fredddie.

It is possible to add more than one .kml file to the KML subpage; that is, you can add a business route if you so desire. However, only Bing Maps will show both routes correctly. Google Maps will only show the last kml file on the page. If you add a business route, it must come before the mainline, otherwise Google Maps will only display the business route.

Installing on Linux

Installing QGIS on Linux
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