topos
I had the chance to play with some new software yesterday, National Geographic Topo!. After wrestling with it for a bit, I figured out how to make it mostly do what I want, which is to draw routes on a map and get an elevation profile. You would think this would be easy, but the route drawing tool is geared towards drawing freehand, and so it’s easy to be quite inaccurate. I wonder how hard it would have been for them to have created a “snap to” feature that could automatically trace along roads. I guess the primary use case of this tool would be to draw freehand routes following trails or whatever.
In essence, it’s possible to use this tool without a GPS, but it’s a lot more annoying. Still, I got it to basically work, and so I started creating some topos of the bike routes I like to ride.
http://www.chizang.net/alex/twowheels/biking.php
Enjoy.
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