Is the bad map layout of European "Garmin" topo maps intentional?

[jonasolof]

Those interested in topographic maps for the Garmin iQue 3600 and other Garmin receivers are well aware that users did not appreciate the way these maps present on the screen.

The greatest discontent was caused by the abundance of superfluous labels such as: HOUSE, LAKE, FOREST, SWAMP, BUILDING etc (all in the respective languages of the indivual prouduct).

A skilled programmer created what was then called Maptools, the sole aim of which is to purge the map files of clutter in order to make them more readable.

Since the swedish maps were of particularly inferior quality, map label clutter was discussed a lot on swedish forum www.utsidan.se and Sportmanship, the producer and national distributor of Garmin must have noticed the complaints.

A new generation of swedish topo maps in the "Garmin" Series is about to be published. So far we only have a few screen shots to judge by. The old series was based on scale 1:100 000 data, the new one is based on the swedish National survey topographic map at 1:50 000 and appears much better - at least in Mapsource. Please see thumb nails

http://www.garmin.se/adfinity.aspx?t...00&menu=false#

However, to our utter amazement and certainly also to our disappointment, shortcomings of the first generation prevail. The worst is of course that clutter remains in the new generation in the form of unnecessary labels, such as hus (house), gård (farm), Sankmark (swamp - in grand bold letters! You'd think it was a place name.). It goes without saying that these labels are not shown in the digital raster topographic maps on which the swedish garmin topo map series is based. There simply isn't any cartographic justification for them, they are remnants from programming left on the maps by purpose.

The same problem is very obvious and has raised a lot of protests as far as the french topo maps series (ww.gpstopo.fr) is concerned. The french, serious outdoor people, also complain about paths being difficult to discern from altitude curves.

My suggestions of editing those maps with Maptools led to angry retributions with legalistic arguments plus expulsion from the gpstopo.fr forum by the admin, who is also the Garmin distributor in France. Interestingly, no reactions have been heard from other national distributors or from Garmin about user modification of maps to improve readablity.

So, was is des Pudels Kern (the gist of the matter)? This perserverance in distributing inferior products is comprehensible only if one tries the hypothesis that the quality level is intentional. Not from the national distributors' side, but from Garmin's.

All topo product follow same pattern. Certain improvements have been made, such as better resolution in the new swedish series or better copy protection in the french series so it is obvious that Garmin enforces strict standards as to how these maps can be produced under the joint national distributor and Garmin label.

Why would Garmin limit the quality level of these products? The answer is obvious from a marketing point of view: In order to maintain a market niche for their own future products which would compete with the existing map series. There isn't any reason to believe that National Survey demand vectorized maps to be compromized.

When offering maps based on national survey data for sale to the public, you can't fool around with geographich data, since that would be considered a security risk to the user. So the way to ensure the desirable compromized quality level is to clutter the maps with cartographically superfluous information and to make symbols difficult to read.

This might sound logical, but what is missing is some evicence of Garmin's intentions. Allow me to quote myself from a post on pdastreet which I wrote after the Cebit fair in March 2005:

"The Garmin rep at Cebit mentioned that Garmin is going to be more directly involved in making european topo maps."

Now, if the much critizised quality level is enforced upon the distributors/producers, they are likewise forced not to discuss the matter. As mentioned above, not a word has been heard from the publishers, afaik.

This taciturnity brings me to the famous remark about Goether's Faust and the "Poodle's Core":

"In 1832 none other than Goethe mentions Rembrands etching The Good Samaritan, in which a yard dog is relieving himself in quite a prominent way. Goethe meticulously describes every detail, but ignores the dog completely, while closer examination shows that the crapping dog is "des Pudels Kern". I.e. the significant phenomenon.

So as far as the maps are concerned, "the def...er, deficiencies are there, they stink but we shall not discuss the matter".

Als man die Absicht merkt ist man verstimmt.

[Paul Wlw]

When offering maps based on national survey data for sale to the public, you can't fool around with geographich data, since that would be considered a security risk to the user. So the way to ensure the desirable compromized quality level is to clutter the maps with cartographically superfluous information and to make symbols difficult to read.

Just out of interest, is there not a simpler explanation? Perhaps these third-party developers just aren't very good at making maps.

I've made Garmin-compatible maps myself. They serve for my purpose, but they LOOK terrible.

For all the shortcomings of those Swedish maps, they're still a lot better than the Garmin-sponsored equivalents for Great Britain. Let me see if I can find the link:-

Oh...

...There aren't any.


-Paul

[jonasolof]

Paul,

I agree that garmin topo maps look awful, especially when you consider how beautiful maps can be. Just think of the way Mapsource displays topo maps. I'm afraid that this will remain, regardless of who makes them. Part of this is due to the compromises made when designing maps to be displayed on small monochrome screens as well as on large, high resolution colour screens.

However, I'm aiming at specific ugly spots on that not too celest body, viz. the text labels mentioned earlier. In order to show the cartographic symbol for a e.g. house on a Garmin map, you enter a hex code. With this code goes a plain text lable "HOUSE" which can easily be omitted - if one wants to.

Having them show up is like demanding that all non US entrants to the Miss World contest wear a moustache, the design of which is decided by the US based organisation committee fr the event.

Regarding the conspicuous abscence of UK topo maps, could it be because Garmin UK is really a Garmin company and not an independent distributor as in the rest of Europe. And Garmin can't publish a better looking UK topo map while enforcing a handicap on the external distributors, it would be all too obvious. So they prefer to wait, until they strike - which will be when the board decides that the market is good enough to wager the battle.

BTW, none of the user made maps at mapCenter, let alone Rich Smith's maps at rwsmaps.griffel.se have these text labels.

As a writer of texts, would you like to see a little symbol accompany each letter to indicate that the letter is indeed a letter?

[Paul Wlw]

I agree that garmin topo maps look awful,...(snip)... Part of this is due to the compromises made when designing maps to be displayed on small monochrome screens as well as on large, high resolution colour screens.

I think a very large part of the clarity problem is due to exactly that.

As a writer of texts, would you like to see a little symbol accompany each letter to indicate that the letter is indeed a letter?

What a brilliant idea! - I'll start working on it a©t o╝n╝c╝e╝...


-Paul

[Red90]

Hmm, must be a 3rd party problem. The Canadian Topo maps don't label things without proper names. The maps are not as complete as the government maps, but they are OK.

Actually, yours look more complete than ours.

[jonasolof]

I think a very large part of the clarity problem is due to exactly that.

True, but that explanation doesn't address the label problem which is even worse on small screens.

What a brilliant idea! - I'll start working on it a©t o╝n╝c╝e╝...
-Paul

Now that looks like a european garmin series topo map

[jonasolof]

Hmm, must be a 3rd party problem. The Canadian Topo maps don't label things without proper names. The maps are not as complete as the government maps, but they are OK.

Actually, yours look more complete than ours.

Lookíng at the french language site for Quebec

http://www.amb-inc.com/garmin/cartographie.asp#topo

I get the impression that there hasn't been any national dealership involved in the making of the Canadian topographic maps. They also differ from the European maps in that they are not locked. The only additional label visible on the CD cover is DMTI spatial, the actual provider of map data. It is concievable that the canadian topo maps have been developed by DTMI Spatial on the direct commercial order of Garmin.

It "must be a 3rd party problem". That's exactly what I'm saying - when a third party is involved, Garmin enforces compromized quality. If the third parties concerned could do as they wish, they would have spent 8 man hours of work plus the use of freely available software to rid the maps of redundant labels - and that is for a whole country.

In Europe, the topo maps are sold and marketed by the national dealerships under the respective company names.

[stephanpls]

IMHO it´s not intentional. I can only speak for the Belgian and the German maps that I have. The Belgian ones have a lot of superfluous labels and the symbols for quite some objects are ridiculous. But the German maps are top quality.
So, I think the third party makers of the Garmin compatible maps sometimes do not know about cartography or digital conversions and are only interested in earning money, others are equally interested in the latter but simply are more professional in the field.
BTW the Dutch topo maps in Garmin format are to be published soon, maybe they are available already. I´m curious about their quality...

[jonasolof]

Hi Stephan,

I own Garmin topo maps of Sweden, Belgium and France and have seen tiles from the US, Germany, Norway and Finland. All the european maps have superfluos labels. In other respects, they can still be of good quality, some are good, some are bad. The Garmin rep to whom I spoke at Cebit in March 2005 mentioned that they were aware of the difference in quality levels.

The finnish maps, based on 1:10 000 and 1:20 000 material are outstanding, the new french maps are pretty good, based on 1: 25 000 digital data, except that altitude curves only appear each 40 meters. A common problem to all is that paths can be difficult to discern from other thin lines, such as altitude curves.

The older swedish maps were based on 1: 100 000 paper map data and had lots of flaws. The new ones are based on 1: 50 000 data and appear to be better. However, the label nuisance is still there.

I find it hard to believe that this problem is only caused by greed and ignorance from inexperienced local distributors. Public reaction to Garmin map quality has been so strong that it must have impaired the market. Garmin could easily have told local distributors that labels should be cleansed, especially in second generation maps.

The reason I raise the topic is the angry reaction of the french topo map maker to my suggestions that users rectify the flaws by cleansing labels and changing symbols for eg paths to something more readable on the particular GPS receiver owned by the user. BTw, licence rules maintains that you don't buy the map product, which I dispute.

Obviously, the licence rules are just words until tried in court. Those rules, presumably based on US legal standards would not be automatically upheld under EU law which gives more rights to the consumer. In a court case I would argue that the consumer should have a right to rectify obvious and critical flaws which have been neglected by the producer - nota bene for the personal use of the individual consumer.

To my knowledge no other map distributors have reacted publicly or privately to discussions on using Maptools to purge maps of labels. I'm aware that France has a particular culture of producer pride/hubris and the client is not supposed to discuss the quality of what is offered, it's take it or leave.

[Ken in Regina]

Hmm, must be a 3rd party problem. The Canadian Topo maps don't label things without proper names.

Actually they do. If you look at Topo Canada v2 you will see, for instance, lots and lots of bodies of water that have such labels. The difference is that you have to place the cursor on them before they display. Take a look at the interior of British Columbia for example and there are thousands of little trickles of blue that display "stream" when you point at them, hundreds of little lakes that display "lake" when you point at them. ... well, except for one unpretentious little lake in the middle of Vancouver Island that displays "ocean" when you point at it. And so on.

They are labels in the underlying geomatic database that the map provider supplies to Garmin. It is then up to Garmin, or whoever packages their map products for them, to decide whether, and how, those labels will be used.

You are right that they do not display by default, as Jonas is describing for the European products. So we do have a much cleaner display in Topo Canada.

...ken...