MapPosterizer

MapPosterizer is a command line application for generating stylish posters of custom city maps.

Installation

Create and activate a virtual environment using virtualenv (or any other tool of choice):

python -m pip install virtualenv
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies from requirements.txt:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

The following command will run MapPosterizer with the default location file location.json and create the output file map.png with the generated poster map:

python posterize.py

Examples

In the following, we provide the respective commands for generating the city poster maps from the teaser image at the top of this page:

# San Francisco:
python posterize.py -m resources/map_style_light.json -c resources/canvas_style_dark.json -l resources/examples/location_san_francisco.json

# New York:
python posterize.py -m resources/map_style_light.json -c resources/canvas_style_dark.json -l resources/examples/location_new_york.json

# London:
python posterize.py -m resources/map_style_dark.json -c resources/canvas_style_dark.json -l resources/examples/location_london.json

# Barcelona:
python posterize.py -m resources/map_style_light.json -c resources/canvas_style_dark.json -l resources/examples/location_barcelona.json

# Munich:
python posterize.py -m resources/map_style_dark.json -c resources/canvas_style_light.json -l resources/examples/location_munich.json

Custom Maps

In order to generate custom maps of arbitrary locations, you can edit the location in the file location.json.

You can get the map coordinates from OpenStreetMap:

• Go to the OpenStreetMap export page https://www.openstreetmap.org/export.
• Below the four coordinates on the top left, click on the link for manual selection of the area of interest.
• Move the view (zoom/translate) to the desired map portion.
• Copy the four coordinates for left, top, right and bottom (and paste them into the location.json file).
• Optional: get the coordinates for heart-shaped pin and paste them as marker coordinates.

You may need to play around with the zoom level (13-18) in order to obtain an optimal result. To figure out a suitable zoom level, it is recommended to always start at a coarse zoom level of 13 and then increase it if the level-of-detail of the generated map is not fine enough. By copying and modifying the json style files for map (resources/map_style_*.json) and canvas appearance (resources/canvas_style_*.json) in the resources/ folder, you can also create completely new custom map styles.

License

The MapPosterizer source code is licensed under the The MIT License, please see the LICENSE file for details.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact Robert Maier <[email protected]>.