Walking Papers

Walking papers allow you to print an area for making handwritten corrections, scanning the result and overlay that on downloaded OSM data. This page handles only that last part. See the Walking papers website for more info on creating the papers.

Installation

In order to use the barcodes usually found in the right bottom corner of Walking papers (recommended) your Merkaartor installation has to build with zbar-support. Alternatively you can enter the URL where you downloaded the walking paper manually.
Normally you should ask the maintainer for your specific operating system / distribution to include zbar-support in Merkaartor if it's currently not. If you want to build your own Merkaartor from source, you should check out this page.

Zbar itself (version 0.10 minimal) has to be build with ImageMagick and Qt-support.

Preparation

The printed / scanned walking papers usually come with a white border. For maximum accuracy however, this border should be cut from the scanned endresult, so that your image is tightly cropped around the barcode and streets.*

Usage

If you used walking papers before, you'll find its image layer already exists in the Layers-dock. If this is your first time using walking papers, you'll have to create the layer from scratch.

Creating the layer

  1. Choose "Layers" from the menu and click "Add new Image layer"
  2. Right-click the new layer in the Layers-dock (Called "Map - None"), choose "Plugins" and then "Walking Papers"

the layer will rename to "Map - Walking Papers" and is now ready for use.

Using the layer

  1. Right click the layer called "Map - Walking Papers" and choose "Load Image"
  2. Choose the right image from the file dialog that appears.
    • Without zbar barcode support or with no barcode present, a new window will appear asking for the URL associated with the paper.
    • With zbar barcode support and a barcode present, the new image will immediately be placed in your working area.

If the image is not immediately visible, you'll have to zoom to its working area. To do this, right-click on the layer in the Layers-dock and choose "Zoom"