Friday, May 08, 2009

sld for geoserver from arcgis

There is a (german) tool out there by Albrecht Weiser to create a sld from an arcgis project, it used to be hosted by http://hgis-germany.de (http://web.archive.org/web/20080123212031/arcmap2sld.geoinform.fh-mainz.de/ArcMap2SLDConverter_Eng.htm) but these days it can be found at http://wald.intevation.org/projects/arcmap2sld

Some documentation is provided by vera lindsay:

How to install and use ArcMap2sld:

1. Download v1.2.2 from http://wald.intevation.org/projects/arcmap2sld

2. Download and install Microsoft .NET Framework from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en

3. Unzip Setup_ArcMap2SLDConverter_1.2.2.zip.

4. To use it open one and only one ArcMap (it lookes for all ArcGIS applications so you can't have catalogue or tools open either).

5. Run /bin/ArcGIS_SLD_Converter.exe. It will default to German so change it to English: Extras>Sprache/Language>English

6. It's prety straight forward from there (at least once you've selected English): select where to save the SLD and other options and click the SLD button on the bottom and whala! Looks like a very nice, clean formated SLD file.


Have a look at http://www.geographie.uni-bonn.de/karto/chapter35_weiserzipf_sld.mobile.pdf

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

map colors

when writing mapserver mapfiles i always tend to choose the wrong colours (even if the mapfile is created from qgis). Today i found this easy webbased tool, colorbrewer, to create and evaluate great colour schemes http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorBrewer/ColorBrewer.html