Abstract
Abstract. The Geological Survey of Brazil has a library of palaeontology symbols to use in geological mapping works, currently in bitmap format and adapted for ESRI platform. This type of representation has presented anti-aliasing problems when reduced, in addition to not being suitable for map presentation on the web, according to OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) specifications. This work presents a reproducible method in any symbol library type. The method consists of converting the symbol library to open-source format, resulting an OpenType font file, which can be installed on any operating system and view each symbol font in any software that has this functionality, such as a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software. The need to develop font construction technique is due to improving typographic quality of cartographic representations and making library compatible with main GIS softwares. Those 61 pictorial palaeontology symbols were converted, one by one, to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format. We imported each symbol as a glyph in FontForge font editor. Major computer platforms use OpenType format due to its wide availability and typographic flexibility, including provisions to deal with diverse characteristics of internationally symbolic alphabet systems. There is even the possibility of symbols standardizing in the UTF-8 alphabet system, an issue for the scientific community to study. The advantage of using the SVG format is its size, a compact text file, and has an excellent compression factor. In addition, version-control repositories, like GitHub, can store SVG files, which would facilitate content management. The adopted method proved to be applicable to any cartographic symbols library with good results. Rendering tests on different platforms (web or desktop) showed no noticeable differences. One of the most important aspects of the method presented in this work was to make cartographic symbols library public and open-source for use by the geoscientific community, regardless whether an open-source or proprietary platform is used, and so, the Geological Survey of Brazil will be able to distribute geological symbology patterns, according to Open Data definition.
Highlights
Symbolization, which is the definition of cartographic symbols and conventions that will represent geographic information on a map or chart, is, along with generalization, one of the cognitive transformations to which geographic information will be subjected
Scalable Vector Graphics format (SVG) format uses vector graphics consisting of geometric primitives such as points, lines, curves and polygons, derived from mathematical expressions and do not lose definition when their size is increased
This scalability is the biggest advantage of using SVG format to represent cartographic symbols instead of using the raster format
Summary
Symbolization, which is the definition of cartographic symbols and conventions that will represent geographic information on a map or chart, is, along with generalization, one of the cognitive transformations to which geographic information will be subjected. Such symbols are classified by their geometry, which can be defined in three graphical primitive classes: points, lines and areas (Cromley, 1992; Robinson et al, 1995). Technical manuals, such as the T 34-700 manual for cartographic conventions of the General Staff of the Brazilian Armed Forces (DSG, 2002), and the standards for the International Map of the World to the Millionth Scale, define the symbology used in the base maps of the Brazilian systematic mapping (IBGE, 1993).
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