Could OpenOrienteering Mapper replace Ocad today?

We have dozens of orienteering maps in my club, Paimion Rasti. Most of them are in active use. We do some smaller maps and practically all updates to existing maps by ourselves. There are many people who are currently working with maps and many who would like to join that group of active members. Should our club or our members waste 500+€ for each member who wants to work with the map files?

OpenOrienteering Mapper is an alternative GPL licensed software to draw orienteering maps. In other words, it is a free version of Ocad, the de-facto standard software used for orienteering maps. The project is now a couple of years old and maturing all the time. There isn’t too many maintainers, but at least the project lead, Kai Pastor, seems really active and skilled developer with the right OSS spirit.

I’m currently seriously considering if we should move to OpenOrienteering Mapper. Our club and members would save a lot of money, there would be a smaller barrier to try out updating our maps and we wouldn’t have to fiddle with different Ocad file versions as everybody are trying to avoid doing an expensive upgrade to their Ocad.

To clear up my mind and raise some discussion, I’m writing down some ideas and concerns of such a change. If somebody has experience of such a shift or has done the same evaluation, please share your thoughts!

Does Mapper contain all relevant features?

Can’t list all features of Mapper and Ocad here, it would be way too long. But to give you prove that Mapper might really be an interesting option, here are some examples of its features:

• Editing symbols and colors, pretty much like in Ocad
• Advanced vector editing includes bezier curves, straight line modes etc
• Georeferencing of maps
• Cross-platform app: runs on Windows, Mac, Android…
• GPS assisted drawing
• Printing and exporting to PDF
• Import of Ocad files (version with 8–12)
• Export to Ocad files (always version 8)
• Excellent performance: opens large files fast and screen updates are super snappy compared to Ocad.

I have never drawn a full map with Mapper, in-fact I have never drawn a full map with Ocad either, but I have done quite a lot of small changes and improvements maps. Also I have done a lot of printing and preparations for offset printing from Ocad and know that industry pretty well as I used to work on the pre-press department of a printing shop years ago, where we also printed some orienteering maps.

From my experiences, I think Mapper has pretty much all those features that I would have needed. “Pretty much” comes from one missing feature that I noticed: creating a PDF file which contains actual spot colors, instead of only process colors, all in one PDF file/page. We used this format for Louna-Jukola maps as it was requested by the printing company doing the offset printing. For the PDF exported from Ocad, we added all sponsor logos and other graphics and texts using Illustrator. That was really handy for us and worked well in a big printing company’s automated process. For offset printing, OpenOrienteering Mapper only supports creating color separations.

I also know that my friend has drawn a complete sprint map with Mapper from Turku and no runners were able to say there was a “special” app used for drawing.

Mapper doesn’t have a course planning mode, something that you can find from Ocad. But I have already advocated PurplePen for years for course setting. It is free, easier and much faster to use, and works well also with Mapper. I think Mapper developers have done a good decision to keep those features out of scope, although I’d love to see a Qt based version of PurplePen so I wouldn’t need to run Windows in VirtualBox to do course setting.

So is there something relevant missing ATM? My guess is not, but please, educate me if there is something missing.

Possible launch strategies

One way would be to start using Mapper for new users only and keep the map files in OCD format. Resistance from existing Ocad users would probably be smallest this way, but I’m bit worried about the losing some information when converting files from and back to Ocad file format. When opening our ocad files I get some errors regarding certain dashed symbols and that certain symbol types cannot be saved back to ocad. Also, we’d lose the georeferencing information that we have on new maps and not supported by Ocad 8 version, IIRC.

Another method would be to just convert all maps to Mapper format and force everybody in the club to start using Mapper instead of Ocad. I think this would have least issues with conversions as we’d be converting only to one direction (which appears to be better supported by Mapper). When we receive a new map file from some professional, who is probably still using Ocad, we’d just convert that to Mapper format and save that to our clubs shared folder.

Technically I’d see the latter a safer route, but I’d anticipate a lot of resistance from those who have become familiar to Ocad and especially from those who have invested their own money to Ocad licenses. Should somehow be able to sell the idea of free software to them. I’m pretty sure though that certain Ocad version 8 users would though be happy as they wouldn’t need to ask other to convert files from newer versions.

Pros and cons

Ocad, pros:

• Lot of experience among users
• Proven technology
• (Somewhat working) course setting functionality
• An amazing set of features

Ocad, cons:

• Expensive €€€
• People have mixed versions as they are reluctant to upgrade
• No support for Mac, Linux, Android
• Certain features are hard to use compared to OS alternative(s) (course setting part’s UX is a joke, certain drawing handles are designed for < 1k screens, printing…)

Mapper, pros:

• Price: 0€
• Cross-platform, Macs and even cheap Android tablets can be used for drawing
• Pretty good UX , even though this complex software sure still needs some learning
• You can fix the bugs yourself (if you know something about C++ & Qt development)
• Performance (at least on my i7 MacBook Pro)

Mapper, cons:

• Less experience among club members
• We might lose some small details of the map data when converting maps to Mapper
• You might have to fix the bugs yourself

What next?

So what is my plan? The plan is to next follow the discussion that I hope this blog entry creates (either private via email or other forums). Mapper and Ocad enthusiasts, fight!

It would really be easier to do the switch if somebody from a large orienteering club would share their experiences from the same thing, but I’m such an OSS nerd that I might put our club to be the pilot as well. I might be ready to propose a full shift right away if somebody already has positive experiences of this task.

If going with without previous experiences from others, we’ll start by updating some smaller and less important map using Mapper and see how it goes. At the same time this would be selling the idea to our clubs active mappers. After collecting some experiences from a map or two, I’d do the final decision about the strategy later.

So please all orienteering mapping gurus, share your knowledge and ideas!