Orienteering NZ Wiki

previous postings on this thread about importing data freely available on linz website into ocad, I'm interested in anyone who has played with combining high quality aerial photos and ocad maps, think the results could be quite cool

Easy in principle to use a photo as a template and print with the template on. I imagine you're thinking of say the contours, road/tracks and streams overlaid on the photo, which provides the ground cover info?

There are some issues with lining the photo up properly. Many qualitatively good photos we used in the past are “as they came out of the camera” with various distortions. For fieldwork purposes you can scan and fit in small pieces but the fudgy overlaps would not be acceptable in a finished product. It is now possible to get digital orthophotos (corrected) and these should fit the topo data nicely.

Leaving aside the topo data, I remember doing an event at Kinloch years ago - day after Katoa Po when they used to do all sorts of fun stuff. The map was a photo with circles on.

This one's specialised, even for this thread. It relates to getting topo data in GIS-industry-standard “Shapefile” format into OCAD. Reasons why you might want to do this: downloads from NZTopoOnline, and contours from local bodies.

Those of us with OCAD Standard can't read shapefiles, but have sometimes been able to get the supplier, or mates, to turn shapefiles into DXF, which is an industry standard but for a different industry - engineering drawing. Hence into OCAD Std.

It seems that deep down one of them works in integers and the other in decimals, and the translation introduces errors. Not big, but they turned up in a very particular circumstance. (They might also have been responsible for the rivers in my topo data not always running quite down the bottom of the valleys. Then again the topo data might not have been perfect to start with.)

Anyway, a map guy who has OCAD Professional tried my “very particular circumstance”, and the resulting OCAD file appears to be perfect. Moral: get someone with OCAD Pro to do it for you; it's not a big job. We should be prepared to pay; OCAD Pro costs quite a bit more.

Can anyone tell me if it is possible to import a .sid or a .ecw file to use as background in OCAD?

don't think so, they would need to be converted using a GIS program first

Try googling 'Convert SID to jpg' or 'Convert ECW to JPG' - there may be freeware which will do the conversion. I have access to software at work which can perform the conversion (eg MrSID Geoviewer then export to TIF then convert TIF to JPG, or FME translate SID, ECW or any format to any other format)

Two useful programs to try for converting raster files are Irfanview and ERViewer ( both free).

When you download Irfanview you will need to also download the plug-ins to get the SID & ecw viewer. Irfanview has lots of other options for processing the images as well - fine rotation, resizing, colour changes. It does not support georeferencing of the image.

http://www.irfanview.com/

ER Viewer part of the ER Mapper set of programs , can handle very big images, and also supports georeferenced files

http://www.erdas.com/products/ERDASERMapper/ERDASERViewer/Details.aspx

OCAD 12 latest update now reads shape files (the easiest format for councils to provide contours in.) Previously you needed the professional version of OCAD to do this, or a messy get-around via DXF format.