Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Maps task force/Tutorial

Using Google Earth

This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Floydian.

The simplest method for most people to create a KML file is using Google Earth, which is free and works on most modern computers.

First time setup

Get Google Earth Ubuntu 11.X tutorial

1. Start up the software.
2. In the Tools menu, at the top, select Options... to bring up the Google Earth Options dialog. By default it should be on the 3D View tab. If not, set it to be.
   • In the Mac version, select the Google Earth menu and Preferences...
3. Under Terrain Quality, set the Elevation Exaggeration to 0; press Ok.
   • This eliminates the surface elevations, making it easier to spot straight lines.
4. On the left are three collapsible navigation panes: Search, Places and Layers.
5. Start by unchecking all of boxes in the Layers pane except Borders and Labels and Places.
   • You may optionally wish to use the roads layer, but it can be a hindrance at times.
6. In the Places pane, on the left, you will see the My Places tree, and Temporary Places. Right-click My Places and Add>Folder in which to save your routes.

Drawing

1. In the Places pane, right-click the folder you are storing your routes in and select Add>Path to bring up the Google Earth - New Path dialog box.
2. Name it after your highway
3. In the Style, Color tab, set the color to pure red (second column, fourth row in the palette or r:255 g:0 b:0) and set the width to 5.0.
4. Without closing the dialog box, start tracing your line. You may want to drag the dialog box over to the side; it can be annoying.
   • Once the dialog box has lost focus (i.e. you click to place your first point on the map), you can use your arrow keys to pan the map.
5. Create your line, point-by-point.

Exporting

1. Once you have finished tracing your line, press ok on the dialog box to close it. Your new path should be listed in the Places pane, within your folder.
2. Right-click that entry (or the line itself on the map), and select Save Place As...
3. Change the Save as type to Kml (it defaults to .kmz when you start the program).
4. Save the file
5. Locate the file on your computer and open it with a plain text editor.
6. Select all>Copy
7. Now create a new subpage of Template:Attached KML using the title of the article – Ontario Highway 401 becomes Template:Attached KML/Ontario Highway 401)
8. Paste the content into this new page and save.
9. Now add {{Attached KML}} to the article itself, in the External links section if it exists.
10. Profit.

Using Google Maps

This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Thewombatguru.

Creating a KML file using this method will only take you about 10 minutes on average and the only things you need are a Google-account and a text-editor.

1. Go to Google Maps.
2. Sign in to your account.
3. Click on "My custom maps" and then click on "Create".
4. Rename "Untitled map" in the top right corner to the name of the road.
5. Click on the "Add directions" icon underneath the search bar.
6. Enter the beginning and end of the road at "A" and "B", drag the markers to the exact places on the map if they are a bit off.
7. Check if the given route follows the roads you want, if it doesn't, hold down the left mouse button on a part of the route and drag it to the desired road.
8. Name your just created directions after the name of the road, followed by a brief description. (e.g. "Test route 54 - West to East" if the route is called "Test route 54")
   1. Repeat step 5 through 8 if you want to have more routes on the same map.
9. Delete the empty "Untitled layer" by clicking on it, then selecting the little downwards arrow and clicking "Delete this layer". Confirm you want to delete it.
10. Click on the folder button next to the "Add layer" button and click "Export to KML", then click "Download" and save it somewhere on your computer.
11. Unzip the .kmz file you downloaded, inside should be a .kml file. (You might have to change the file extension to .zip first)
12. Open the .kml file with a text editor (preferably Notepad++).
13. Replace the text in between the third "<Name>" and "</Name>" parameters with the text in between the second "<Name>" and "</Name>" parameters, and rename that text to the name of the route. (e.g. "Test route 54")
14. Scroll down through the coordinates of the first route until you see "</coordinates>".
    1. If you made another route, delete everything from "<placemark>" to the third "</name>".
    2. Add a "0" to the "<styleUrl>" paramater. (e.g. from "<styleUrl>#line-1267FF-1</styleUrl>" to "<styleUrl>#line-1267FF-10</styleUrl>")
    3. Replace the text in between the "<Name>" and "</Name>" parameters with the name of the road followed by a brief description. (e.g. "Test route 54 - East to West" if the route is called "Test route 54")
       1. If you made even more routes, repeat step 13, but for the third route add two "0"s, for the fourth three "0"s, etc.
15. Scroll down through the coordinates of the last route until you see the "</coordinates>" parameter. Delete everything from "<placemark>" to the second "</placemark>"
16. If you made more than 1 route, copy the last "<style>" section and paste it underneath it.
    1. Add "0"s to the style ids so they correspond with the ids given before. (e.g. from "<Style id='line-1267FF-1>" to "<Style id='line-1267FF-10>")
    2. Change the figure in between the "<width>" and "</width>" parameters to "5".
    3. Change the figures and letters in between the "<color>" and "</color>" for the first route to "FF0000FF", for the second route to "FF00FFFF", and for all remaining routes to "FFFF0000".
17. Save the file and copy all the text.
18. Go to Template:Attached KML/ followed by the exact name of the road article, paste the text on the new page, and safe it. (e.g. for road "Test route 54" go to Template:Attached KML/Test route 54)
19. Add {{Attached KML|display=inline,title}} to the road article itself in the "References" or "External Links" sections. See link below.
20. Go to the talk page of the road article and edit the page, add "needs-kml=no" to the {{WikiProject U.S. Roads}} template or change "needs-kml=yes" to "no".
21. You've now created your KML file and added it to the corresponding article. Congratulations!

Using qGIS and shapefiles

This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Scott5114.

Having created a map as shown above, creating a KML file to attach to the article is simple. You can think of a KML file as basically a stripped-down version of a shapefile—it contains a set of geographic coordinates that express your route's location. However, while a shapefile encodes the coordinates as binary data, KML is expressed as textual XML data, which is easier to parse and edit. KML files are supported by many mapping applications, such as Google Earth, and can be reused by many people outside the project for a variety of purposes. Online mapping apps like Google Maps and Bing can also read and display KML files, which means that readers can choose to see the route highlighted on a map with towns and cities labeled that they can zoom in on and pan. The utility of generating a KML file is a no-brainer.

1. You will need to have finished creating a map in QGIS in the manner described above. This walkthrough begins after approximately Step 22 of the above tutorial.
2. Right-click the layer containing the "highlighted road" (the layer that contains just the road of interest, colored red). Select "Save as...".
3. A dialog called "Save vector layer as..." should appear. Change the "Format" dropdown to "Keyhole Markup Language [KML]".
4. Move down to the line labeled "CRS" and click "Browse".
5. Expand the "Geographic Coordinate Systems" entry on the tree view. Find "WGS 84" and select it. Click "OK". (In the future, you will be able to select WGS 84 from the "Recently used coordinate systems" list.)
6. Select a location to save the KML file to.
7. Finally, click OK on the "Save vector layer as..." dialog. QGIS should notify you that the export was completed successfully.
8. Open the KML you just generated in a text editor such as Notepad, emacs, etc.
9. Copy all text in the KML file to the clipboard.
10. Now you'll create a subpage of Template:Attached KML corresponding with the title of the article (for example, for the article Oklahoma State Highway 84, the KML page will be Template:Attached KML/Oklahoma State Highway 84. (Create this by going to the search box and typing in << Template:Attached KML/[name of page you have map for] >>. Wikipedia will tell you that page does not exist and allow you to create it. In this example, you'd type <<Template:Attached KML/Oklahoma State Highway 84 >> into the search box to create the subpage for it.)
11. Paste the KML text into this page and save. Do not attempt to format it; doing so will break the XML. Any wikicode intermingled in the KML page will cause parsing problems. You may wish to note in the edit summary that the KML was generated with the same data as the article's map.
12. Go to the article and place the text {{Attached KML}} in the article right below the heading for External Links. The template should be placed in the External Links section because it contains links to external websites. This Attached KML text with the curly brackets tells Wikipedia to look for the template with the same name as as page you are looking at and display that KML in the format set up for Wikipedia to display it. (Smart, hugh.)
13. You're done! Users can now use the KML data.

Alternative using qGIS and shapefiles

This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Allen4names.

You will need Quantum GIS and the shapefiles. I am using version 1.8.0 of qGIS for this tutorial.

1. Open the .shp file(s) that have the data you want in qGIS.
   • For the example below I am using s53nhpn.shp (archive filename s53nhpn.zip) from the web site linked above.
2. Go to the attribute table (right click on each layer) and select the records you want to use.
   • In this example I clicked on "SIGN1" at the top of the attribute table window and scrolled down to U12. I selected records 4023-4079 and repeated with "SIGN2" and "SIGN3" making sure not to unselect any.
3. In the main window choose right click on each layer and choose "Save selection as...". Choose a file name and save.
   • Make sure that the format is "Keyhole Markup Language [KML]".
4. Edit the file in a plain text editor to replace each instance of "<LineStyle><color>ff0000ff</color></LineStyle>" with "<LineStyle><color>ff0000ff</color><width>5</width></LineStyle>" and save.
5. Check the file using Google Earth or paste the resulting code into a KML sandbox to test it using Google Maps or Bing Maps.
   • Example URLs: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DUser%3AAllen4names%2FKML_sandbox%26action%3Draw http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?mapurl=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fw%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DUser%3AAllen4names%2FKML_sandbox%26action%3Draw
6. If there is nothing wrong you can create a subpage of {{Attached KML}} using the code you created and add the template to the article.
   • It should be noted that I did find errors. There where two missing sections. One along I-5 and the other along I-82.

Using ShareMap.org social web mapping service

This portion of the tutorial was contributed by User:Jkan997.

1. Go to ShareMap.org and create map (registration not required, but recommended)
2. Draw your map, import data from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap (with wizard or pure XAPI queries)
3. Save map
4. Go to tools tab in view mode and select KML export
5. Save exported KML file

More informations

here

Recorded screencasts

here on YouTube