Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
A while ago, a friend announced that he was planning to write a book about the Australian Army's involvement in France during the First World War. Having recently retired with plenty of time on my hands, I volunteered to produce some maps to be included in the book. During my working life, I had been involved with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and assumed that the open-source product QGIS would be just what was needed. Very soon I realised that was not the case. It does an excellent job of storing and editing the location and overlaying of masses of geographic information. What I needed as well was full control over the layout of textual information such as town names, military positions, and movements.
So I turned to Inkscape and worked my way through the first dozen or so instalments of Mark Crutch’s tutorials starting in Full Circle issue 61 back in May 2012. This gave me all I needed to get started – sorry Mark but black-and-white maps printed on paper don’t make use of the latest 100+ episodes. What follows is the basic outline of how I produced the maps together with some tips I picked up along the way.
Getting Started
First thing is to find an existing map of the area of interest. The extent of the map varies depending on whether this is for a specific battle or a larger area showing troop movements. Sometimes the author was able to supply a copy of the ‘Trench Map’ used by the army at the time, but, more often, I started with a list of towns that were in the area. I found a Map of France website (www.map-france.com) very useful here as it allows searching French towns by name, but there are many other websites that can be used. I was surprised how often the same name was used for two or three towns in different parts of the country. Once I found the area I wanted, I would take a screenshot and save it as a jpg file.
Now start up Inkscape and Import the saved JPG file. On the Import dialog, choose Imbed and From File. This imports our base map and displays it on the screen. In the Layer list down the left side of the screen you will see it named ‘Layer 1’. Rename the layer to something like Background by right-clicking on the name. This layer will not appear on the finished map, but the features required will be transferred onto new layers.
Layers
I found the more layers I had the better. Starting with the first background layer, I added separate layers for every type of feature to be shown: coastlines, roads, railways, rivers, lakes, woods, troop start positions, end positions, movement arrows, and more. Roads and railways actually had two layers – see below. I usually ended with up to 20 layers on each map.
Even though the final result was to be a black-and-white map, I often used colors while capturing the linework – blue for water, red for roads, black for railways, etc, then changed them to black later. Having all of the one feature on its own layer allows you to select all those features and change the size, line style, text font, or whatever, in one step.
Capturing Linework
I used the Draw Bezier Curves and Straight Lines tool, and clicked on the start of a line then double-clicked on the end point. This gave me a straight line between the two points. Zoom in at one end and using the Edit Paths by Nodes tool, double-click on the new line to create a node then drag it to the correct position. Repeat this procedure until you get to the other end. This is what it looks like part way through, capturing part of the France-Belgium border.
Roads and Railways
Depending on the scale of your map, the road may appear as a single line, but most of the battle plans were drawn at a larger scale, requiring roads to be shown as two parallel lines, with a gap between. After some experimentation, I found the easy way to achieve this was to start with a single black line, thick enough to cover the whole width of the road, as my Roadsides layer. Then duplicate that layer, rename it as road centres, change the color to white, and decrease the width a little to allow the edge of the roadsides layer to show through. As you can see below, road intersections are handled as they should be. Railways are just as easy, just use a dashed white line as your railway centre.
Towns
Again these change with the scale, sometimes shown as dots, sometimes with a black border and a shade of grey inside. Be aware of where the town layer is in the list, depending on whether you want to see other features visible through the town or have the town obscuring anything underneath. When I was showing the towns as dots, I would use the circle tool to draw one and fill it with black, then copy it for all the other towns to make sure they were all the same size.
Town names (and any other text) usually need to be on a higher level, so the name is not covered up by other features. I found getting the size and position of text was surprisingly time consuming.
Woods, Trenches and Special Symbols
While Inkscape comes with a good selection of line styles and area shades, it does not have much in the way of mapping symbols. Here I searched through the range of Inkscape tutorials and was able to find what I needed. For instance, a wooded area is usually shown covered by little tree symbols. To achieve this, I zoomed right in, and, on yet another layer, drew a tiny tree, and made a copy of it a little above and to the right. Then, using the technique described in the Inkscape Tutorial on patterns-for-mechanical-drawings, I was able to produce an acceptable result. Another tutorial on drawing ropes helped me create and use a symbol to show trenches (there were a lot of them in that war).
Output and Edits
The only way to save your work in Inkscape – so you can work on it later – is as an SVG file. However, when sending my (draft) maps to the author, he needed JPG files. Inkscape can export only to PNG files, which I then converted to JPG using GIMP and emailed them to him. Often (well always), they needed changes so he would print them out, mark the changes in pencil, scan that, and send it back as another JPG file. I would add this as a new layer to Inkscape, and stretch it so that it was the same size as the original, making sure to retain the same aspect ratio. This step was often repeated several times.
Eventually, we were both happy, and a final JPG file was produced to send to the publisher. Altogether, over 30 maps were produced for the book which is now awaiting publication. Here is a sample of a finished map.