Frequently Asked Questions about GPS Visualizer

General questions

• Do you take suggestions for new/enhanced features?
• What are GPS Visualizer's system requirements?
• I got the output to look just right, and now I want to save those settings for the next time I make a map. Is that possible?
• Is GPS Visualizer available as a standalone application that I can download and use off-line?

Mapping issues

• I want to map a collection of individual points, but GPS Visualizer keeps connecting the points with a line as if they were a "track."
• I plotted both track data and waypoints, but some of my waypoints are not appearing on the map.
• I tried to map a collection of waypoints where one of the points was a long way from the others, and the far-flung point is not showing up; or, my file contains one or two waypoints that are far away from my other points, and I don't want to plot the "outliers."
• My map is too skinny; how can I make it closer to square?

GPS data files

• My data is in tab-delimited or comma-separated text files. In which units should the coordinates, elevation and speed be represented?
• Can I use UTM coordinates?
• Are the names of my data files important?
• I have a Garmin Forerunner, and I don't want my ENTIRE Logbook to be mapped; how can I only map some of the tracks?

Google Maps

• How can I print my Google Map or save it as a JPEG?
• How can I save my Google Map on my desktop or my own Web site?
• How do I insert my Google Map into another Web page?
• Once I've got a Google Maps API key, what's the best way to incorporate the map into my page? Can I put multiple maps on the same page?
• How can I exclude certain background map choices from the map type control on a Google Map?

SVGs, JPEGs & PNGs

• Firefox can now read SVG files on its own; do I still need Adobe's plug-in?
• Which output format should I use: SVG, JPEG, or PNG?
• Where do the backgrounds in the SVG/JPEG/PNG maps come from?
• I selected a background map, but nothing is showing up.
• I asked for a USGS "Urban Areas" color aerial photo, but it's blank.
• I saved an SVG and tried to open it in Adobe Illustrator, but the background map isn't showing up. What can I do?

Yes, of course. However, since no one's paying me to work on GPS Visualizer -- aside from the few kind souls who have sent donations -- I can't devote all of my time to it. So, regardless of their usefulness, "easy" suggestions (like fixing the text-import routines to work with more data files) get implemented much quicker than long, involved ones (like figuring out how to incorporate maps from the UK Ordnance Survey) that would require writing or re-writing big chunks of programming code.

After you draw a map, you should see a link that says "Return to the GPSV map form," or "Return to the input form," or something along those lines. It will either be to the right of your map or below the link to your output file (in the case of Google Earth, profiles, or text conversion). Click on that link and then bookmark it -- add it to your Favorites -- or whatever your Web browser calls the process of saving a URL for later. The resulting bookmark will take you to a form with all your favorite options pre-selected. Note that all the options are sitting right there in the URL of the form (for example, the width of the map would be indicated by "&width=800"), so you can also adjust it if need be.

To create and view JPEG and PNG images, you don't need anything special -- any Web browser will work. GPS Visualizer is platform-independent.

For Google Maps, any modern browser should work just fine.

To use Google Earth files (.kml/.kmz), you'll need Google Earth, which is a free download for either Mac OS or Windows.

To view SVG maps and profiles, you either need a browser with built-in SVG capabilities, or Adobe's SVG Viewer plug-in (which unfortunately hasn't been updated since 2003).

No. But it's really not all that useful without background maps, Google Earth, or the Google Maps API, and you'd need to be on-line to access those anyway.

When you upload plain-text data, GPS Visualizer tries to "guess" what kind of data it is. If there is a "type" column filled with T's or W's (indicating trackpoints or waypoints), there will be no question. If there is a "name" column, the default behavior will be to read your file as discrete points (waypoints). In the absence of a "name" column, the default will be a continuous line (trackpoints).

So, if your waypoints are erroneously read as trackpoints (or vice versa), there are a few different things you can do to fix it:

1. In the input form, set the "Force plain text" drop-down menu to the appropriate option.
2. If you want waypoints, add a "name" field to your data; you probably want to define names anyway, as they make for a more useful map. (if you have names in a different field, like "Site ID" or "Company," just rename it that field to "name," or use the "synthesize names" feature in the advanced options.)
3. Add a type column and fill it with T or W as appropriate.

For more information, see the plain-text data tutorials.

By default, GPS Visualizer only shows those points that are within or very close to the boundaries of your track data. This way, you can upload a file with points from all over the world, but you won't get a map covering the whole world (or however much territory is covered by your waypoint collection). But if you do need to plot all of your points on your map, just change the "Show waypoints" menu to "All" -- in some map forms, this setting may be in the "advanced" waypoint options. You can also try leaving it on "In bounds of track plus padding" and increasing the "padding."

You may need to adjust the "discard outliers" setting, under "Advanced waypoint options."

If you want all points to be plotted, regardless of how far away they are, set it to "No, show all points" (if you are also uploading tracks, you will also need to verify that the "Show waypoints" setting is on "All").

If you want fewer waypoints to be plotted -- for instance, if you have a large cluster of points near your home and you only want to show those -- set it to discard points whose critical Z-score exceeds a lower number than the default of 4; try Z > 2 or even Z > 1.

The dimensions of your map are determined by your data. If you plot a track along a road that goes directly east-west, you'll get a map that is much wider than it is tall. If you're making a Google Map, you can manually set the height and/or width, and you can also set the "initial zoom level" to -1 if you want the map to cover more area. For a JPEG, PNG, or SVG map, increase the "margin" setting or manually set the height and/or width.

Plain-text coordinates should ideally be decimal; this means south and west are negative, north and east are positive, and there is no such thing as minutes and seconds. If you do submit degrees and minutes, or degrees, minutes, and seconds, GPS Visualizer will try to figure it out, but there are no guarantees. Just make sure that latitude and longitude are each represented by a single column; you can't have multiple columns for degrees, minutes, and seconds.

Elevation is interpreted as meters, and speed is interpreted as kilometers per hour, unless the header row indicates otherwise -- for example, you could name the speed column "speed (mph)", and GPS Visualizer should understand what you mean. (In GPX files, however, please note that speed should be in meters per second.)

See the Waypoints Tutorial for more information.

You can use UTM coordinates in plain-text files with a header, as long as the columns containing the UTM coordinates are properly labeled (UTM Zone, UTM Easting, & UTM Northing).

Yes. For the most part, GPS Visualizer determines what kind of files you've uploaded based on the names of the files. Here's the (almost) complete list of filename endings that GPS Visualizer recognizes:

Also, be aware that the first part of a file's name (before the suffix) will be used as the name of the track -- that is, if it's a file format that doesn't include a specific place for track names.

Split the Logbook XML file into individual runs and upload them separately. You could do it by hand using a text editor, but it's a lot easier to use GPS Visualizer's Logbook Splitter utility.

Good question. It seems that printing maps created using the Google Maps API is unreliable at best. Every browser seems to behave a little bit differently, so any "tricks" I include to make it work in, say, Firefox, might cause everything to blow up in Internet Explorer.

The safest bet is to simply take a screen shot and print that. Here are some tips on doing that:

Firefox (any platform): I highly recommend installing a Firefox add-in that can capture the entire contents of a browser window -- even the parts that are currently off-screen. Screengrab! works with older versions of Firefox (up to v6) in both Windows and Mac. Windows users with newer versions of Firefox can download Fireshot, which is also available for Internet Explorer. If you make a very large Google Map that extends outside the borders of your monitor, Screengrab and Fireshot can still fetch all of it into a single JPEG or PNG file. (Note: be sure not to select "full-screen mode" when you make your map; in full-screen mode, the map is exactly as big as your browser window and no larger.)

Mac OS X: The keystroke Command-Shift-3 will save a picture of your entire screen to your Desktop. You can open that picture in a graphics program or just print it as-is using a program like Preview. Perhaps more useful is Command-Shift-4, which changes your cursor into a crosshair so that you can select the area of the screen that gets saved (hit the space bar to select an entire window). Or, to save part of the screen to the Clipboard -- from whence you can paste the captured area into another program -- try Command-Shift-Control-4. See the "Other Commands" section of this Apple support document for even more options.

Windows: Hitting the Print Screen key copies the contents of the entire screen to the clipboard, and from there you can paste it into a graphics program -- even MS Word or "Paint," if you don't have anything fancier. Alt-Print Screen copies only the frontmost window. Or, for far more flexibility and options, I recommend IrfanView, a powerful freeware utility. (Click here for more info on Windows screen captures.)

Note that there may be copyright issues involved with using Google's street maps or satellite imagery. If that's a concern -- because your map may be published commercially -- use one of the alternative backgrounds, like topo maps, USGS aerials, or OpenStreetMap/OpenCycleMap.

When GPS Visualizer creates a Google Map, it uses a "Google Maps API key" that is unique to gpsvisualizer.com; files created with that key can only be viewed while they are on this site. However, getting an API key is free, so if you want to put a saved map on your own site, you can sign up for your own key (in the Services section, enable "Google Maps API v2," then find your key in the API Access section), and include yours in the HTML source of the map page. Just put your key between the quotes in the line of code that looks like this:

  var google_api_key = '';

If you just want to save the map on your computer's hard drive and view it "locally," you don't need to bother with a key.

NOTE: When you tell your Web browser to "Save" your map, do not choose "Save all files" or "Save Web archive" or "Web page, complete" or "MHTML" or ".mht" or anything else that suggests that your browser will create a collection of local graphics and JavaScript files along with the HTML file itself. You want to save the HTML source only.

If you don't have your own Web server, you can upload your map to a free Dropbox.com account; the "public link" for your map will begin with "dl.dropbox.com", so you can use this API key:

If you don't need an interactive map, but rather just an image, see above under "How can I print my Google Map or save it as a JPEG?"

By far the easiest solution is to put the map in an "inline frame" using the <IFRAME> tag. This creates a "window" in your page into which you can load another file (more info about IFRAMEs). The advantage of doing this is that the DIVs and margins and styles and whatnot will be completely isolated from the rest of the structure of your page; also, you don't have to edit the attributes of the <BODY> or <HTML> tags, which you would have to do if you tried to merge the GPS Visualizer code into your Web page. (The only disadvantage, and one which would only affect "power users," is that if you want to create objects that interact with the map -- for instance, a list of waypoints, or a control that will re-center the map -- those cannot be outside the IFRAME.)

Another advantage to IFRAMEs (as opposed to cutting and pasting bits of HTML into your page) is that you can place as many of them on your page as you want; because they are isolated from each other, there shouldn't be any conflicts even if all the maps have identically named parts.

Here's a sample <IFRAME> tag; the anchor in the middle will only be displayed if the browser does not support inline frames:

<iframe src="my_map.html" width="600" height="400" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0">
  <a href="my_map.html">Click here for the map</a>
</iframe>

Please note that while it is technically possible to simply create an IFRAME that points to your map's initial URL on gpsvisualizer.com, that is only a very temporary solution, as older maps are deleted from the server every night. Instead, you should save a copy of the map to your own server (and with your own API key), as described above.

Edit your map's HTML source and look for gv_options.map_type_control.excluded; edit the list in square brackets to include whichever maps you want to hide. The list of possibilities is below; be sure to enclose the blue codes in quotes and separate them with commas inside the brackets.

Google map: G_NORMAL_MAP; Google aerial: G_SATELLITE_MAP; Google hybrid: G_HYBRID_MAP; U.S./Can.: MyTopo: MYTOPO_TILES; USGS topo: USGS_TOPO_TILES; USGS color aerial: USGS_COLOR_TILES; USGS aerial+G.: USGS_COLOR_HYBRID_TILES; USGS B/W aerial: USGS_AERIAL_TILES; U.S. counties: US_COUNTY_TILES; Canada Toporama: NRCAN_TOPORAMA_TILES; Can. Topo (no names): NRCAN_TOPORAMA2_TILES; Can. topo (old): NRCAN_TOPO_TILES; Landsat 30m: LANDSAT_TILES; Blue Marble: BLUEMARBLE_TILES; OpenStreetMap: OPENSTREETMAP_TILES; OpenCycleMap topo: OPENCYCLEMAP_TILES; Yahoo map: YAHOO_MAP; Yahoo aerial: YAHOO_AERIAL; Yahoo hybrid: YAHOO_HYBRID.

If you're just going to look at your map, SVGs are really not much different from "flat" pixel-based image formats, and you may as well make a JPEG or PNG. (The only difference between JPEG & PNG files is that PNGs are larger, uncompressed files -- PNGs look a little bit cleaner but can take longer to load. The actual drawing is the same.)

But, if you need to import your data into a vector graphics program like Adobe Illustrator, an SVG map can be very very useful -- and as far as I know, GPS Visualizer is the only utility out there that can turn any GPS data into editable vectors.

The maps are NOT stored on GPS Visualizer's server; they come from various sources on the Web. For instance: the USGS topo maps and aerial photos come from msrmaps.com; the Landsat imagery comes from NASA's Jet Propulsion Labratory; the excellent Canadian digital maps come from Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). The list of backgrounds changes from time to time as new data sources become available or are removed from public circulation. If you know of any other sites which might work, please let me know!

By the way, the U.K. Ordnance Survey's on-line maps will NOT work with GPS Visualizer; believe me, I've tried.

• It hasn't shown up yet. Be patient. Some of the map choices (such as the Canada-specific ones) take a long time to show up, especially in urban areas where there is a lot of detail.
• The map server is down. I don't have any control over the servers that produce these maps, and sometimes they become unavailable for a few minutes, hours, or days. The NASA Landsat server in particular often suffers from overload, which means blank backgrounds in GPS Visualizer maps.
• You're asking for a larger size than the map server is willing to give. For some servers, the upper limit is 1024 pixels, for others it's 2000 pixels.
• You're out of range. If you try to display a U.S.-only map behind a track that was recorded in Sweden, it just isn't going to work.
• You're in the boondocks. If you're trying to plot a 5-kilometer hike in the Australian Outback, your background might be blank because there's simply nothing to draw!

The USGS Urban Areas photos make for excellent maps, but unfortunately only a limited number of cities in the U.S. are covered. More may be coming in the future, but I don't know when.

When you first create your SVG, be sure to enable to option labeled "Embed map in SVG." Illustrator isn't able to display linked graphics on remote Web sites, but it can handle embedded JPEGs.