WanMil wrote:
Hi Steve,
I have just started to have a look on the internals of the garmin fileformat. The wiki (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Format) tells me that there are the formats TRE NOD MDR SRT GMP DEM
The documentation of the garmin-img sourceforge project also mentions the formats not yet documented in the wiki: LBL RGN NET
I think LBL is the file in which the labels are stored in a non searchable format. And MDR contains the same information like LBL but it is searchable. Am I right?
It would be good if you can put your current knowledge to the wiki.
WanMil - My current knowledge (or at least 95% of it) is already on the wiki! That's the whole idea - to allow others to pick up on it and to join in. Most of my own contributions have been to the MDR file page and the SRT file page as you'll see from the 'history' tabs of both of them. Steve, I think I misunderstood your email: "I tend to write up my findings on the .MDR file on the wiki". I just wanted to bear you out in writing things down to the wiki. You've already done that so that's superfluous.
Please note that these pages are *not* wikipedia! Quite a bit of the information is highly speculative, there are great big missing bits and all we can say is that "this is the best we know so far".
(sometimes wikipedia is also quite speculative.....:-)
You are right that the LBL, RGN and NET files have not even got pages started yet, though quite a bit is known about those file formats as mkgmap writes them. But writing those wiki pages takes time and effort. The primary authors of mkgmap are putting their work into actual coding (which is great) so it's up to others to get going on documentation.
My interest in MDR is because I'd like the address-searching features to work better than they do, and this is an aspect of mkgmap that isn't really written properly yet. Some of it works, and MDR files can be produced using mkgmap followed by mapsource. I'm trying to take mapsource out of the loop.
Can you say some words about the status of the display project (http://svn.parabola.me.uk/display)? Does it contain the latest information about the file format or does it need some update? The revision 229 is quite old. I am just looking for a good start point where I can get in contact with the garmin file format.
Hopefully this will help to make progress to this long outstanding and highly demanded feature.
The more of us there are working on it, the better! Steve
Let's light up the rest of the unknown bits! WanMil