Xrmap 2.33 review

Xrmap is a program running under X that can interactively display portions of the Earth, using the huge CIA world vector map. The Xr

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 8566K Developer: Jean-Pierre Demailly

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Xrmap is a program running under X that can interactively display portions of the Earth, using the huge CIA world vector map.

The Xrmap program provides a user-friendly X client for generating images of the Earth and manipulating the CIA World data bank II global vector information (a huge geodata set of about 45 MB).

Available features include coastlines and islands, political boundaries, major and minor rivers, glaciers, lakes, canals, reefs, etc. The images can be accurately zoomed in, up to a factor of 100 or more. The package also contains a rather comprehensive data set of world cities and locations - about 20000 cities are listed.

Xrmap is derived from the rmap console only utility by Reza Naima.

However, xrmap has many more features than the original 'rmap', especially it implements Rectangular, Mercator and Miller projections in addition to the Spherical projection, as well as reverse search of coordinates. All parameters and configurations can be set interactively from the GUI.

Xrmap supports writing images in ppm, xpm, ps or compressed ppm.gz, xpm.gz, ps.gz formats. It can also produce images without entering into the GUI, since most parameters can alternatively be set via the command line options (still, xrmap requires the X environment to do so, in contrast with rmap).

What's New in This Release:
Xrmap now directly reads vector formats EPS, SVG or bitmap formats PNG, GIF, JPG. The encapsulated PostScript format EPS is the preferred format for flags, since it is reasonably fast and provides resizable and better looking flags. Other formats are no longer needed to run xrmap, although slower machines can benefit from installing the xpm_150 flags as a fallback, since they load much faster and occupy less disk space...
Overall handling of images improved, a memory cache is used, more explicit error messages are provided, etc.
Option -define "picon|..." replaced by more general -define "image|..." which supports all image types recognized by xrmap.
Bug fixes : option -define "exec|..." was fixed. Thanks to the FreeBSD port maintainer (Serge Gagnon ) for pointing out the bug. Many other small fixes.
Uploaded version 2.5 of SVG/EPS/PNG/XPM flags, including some additions and corrections (flags of Bangladesh, Morocco, Pakistan, Sudan, United States; French, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, US and UK territories completed)
Support for mouse wheel buttons in emx and all xrmap functions (file explorer, scrolling lists)
An abbreviated menu with the most common functions is now opened by default (rather than the intimidating complete menu).
Improvement in file explorer (more numerous file types are recognized).
Data window GUI reworked (and hopefully improved)
Smarter exit routine (xrmap asks confirmation rather than quitting abruptly).
New release. The binary size increased by more than 14%. Sloccount indicates more than 25,000 lines of code in total (7% increase with respect to 2.32).