MapTiler

MapTiler is a program that helps downloading and preprocessing tiles from a geoservice or geoimage format, as for example WMS, WMTS, or GeoTiff. To process the tiles, MapTiler implements a processing pipeline in which tiles are first downloaded, then preprocessed on the GPU, before written to disk. The idea is that this pipeline will be configurable in the future. MapTiler is implemented in c++ and uses libgdal to provide support for a wide variety of geodata formats. At the time of writing, MapTiler only writes Png or GeoTiff files as output. The latter format is the default as it also provides means to save a GPS bounding box in the image metadata.

Dependencies

MapTiler has a number of dependencies that have to be installed before attempting to build the software.

• CMake (>= 3.5),
• libgdal (>= 2.2),
• Qt5 (>= 5.10), in specific the QLocation and QCoreApplication classes,
• libpthread
• libpng
• libuuid
• libGL, libGLEW, libGLU and libglfw

In addition to that, MapTiler is implemented using the C++14 standard. To be compiled, it needs a compiler that support this standard. Any modern gcc or llvm/clang compiler should be sufficient. It has been successfully compiled using GCC 5.0 and GCC 7.0.

Ubuntu Installation

To install the above dependencies in ubuntu type the following:

sudo apt-get install cmake libpng-dev uuid libgl-dev libglew-dev libglu-dev libglfw3-dev libgdal-dev

Also to install qt 5 download the latest (open-source) qt 5 package (>= 5.10) at:

https://www.qt.io/download

Follow the instructions there to install it. Make sure you install Qt under $HOME in the $HOME/Qt directory. For MapTiler to work out of the box install Qt 5.10.1 next to the current version. If you get an error about some SSL libs not being able to load, run the following command:

sudo apt install libssl1.0-dev

Compilation

MapTiler can be compiled using CMake. In the location that you would like to save and build the code run the following in the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/thinkpractice/MapTiler.git
cd MapTiler
cmake .
make

Running MapTiler

To run MapTiler, several options have to specified first. The general syntax to run MapTiler looks like this:

./MapTiler [options] rasterurl polygonurl

Options

The following options can be provided to the application:

• -h, --help, displays a help message.
• -v, --version, displays version information.
• -d, --defaulturls, uses default urls for rasterurl and vectorurl.
• --address location, the location (address/city name/region) for which the tiles should be downloaded.
• -a, --addressoption locationoption, the location option to choose if the address gives back multiple option (default=first).
• -t, --target-directory directory, copy all the tiles into directory.
• -c, --tilewidth width, the width (number of columns) of the tiles to be written to disk.
• -r, --tileheight height, the height (number of rows) of the tiles to be written to disk.

Arguments

Unless the -d, --defaulturls option (see above) has been specified MapTiler also needs the following arguments:

• rasterurl, url to raster webservice (WMS/WMTS) with the aerial image.
• vectorurl, url to the vector webservice (WFS) with the polygons.