If you don't know about them, the guy who invented the London subway map was a genius and has been copied around the world. His idea was to decouple map scale from the pure relationships between the routes in order to show them more compactly and intuitively to the users.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_mapI have thought of an application for such a map, but didn't know how to draw one with inkscape and I've been putting it off for over a year :-( Truly, I'm not an artist and always fall back to gimp to get things done, since I already know how to use it.
Well, tonight after I came back from skiing I was finally motivated enough to want to build that 'tube map' of the trails. My real need is to be able to recolour the maps easily from the pure text svg files.
I poked around and settled on the pen tool after trying out the connector tool. It took me a while to find ctrl+shift+F and P, but I did in the end. I guessed at holding down various keys while I drew to try and constrain the angle (because I know other things that work that way, gimp, libreoffice draw et al.).
In the end, after only messing about for about a half hour or so...
It's like Inkscape is BUILT to draw tube maps! :-) I'm very happy!
- choose the pen tool and set the stroke width and colour
- click and then press and hold the control key to restrain your angles while you draw
- press the control key and THEN click to make a dot x-times the size of the pen line (genius)
Wow! I have far to go in getting info from various maps, but I now know I can represent them (and manipulate their vars easily) from inkscape svg files.
Just about to start on how many nodes I need...
;-)
