Offline Tile Maps with Taho

Trivia

Below is an additional guide for downloading Map Tiles using the Taho program, which can be easily utilized as Offline Maps in SmartPTT Dispatcher.

Here's the official website for the Taho program and its creator.
Please select another program from this article if you can not make an offline map according to this guide.

Step-by-step guide

For demonstration purposes, in this example, we will download the area of Miami into Offline maps:

1. Download and install the Taho software;
2. Launch the software, it should look something like this:
   
   
   
3. Now you'd need to select the area of the map you'd like to download and the easiest way to do it is with the embedded BBox-Tool:
    
   
   
4. After clicking the BBox-Tool button, the software will open your browser with a world map page and a BBox-tool prompt window with instructions.
   We will get back to the prompt window later in the guide, for now just leave it open.
   
   In the opened browser map, zoom in on the area that you want to be in Offline Maps, click on the select area at the top-left of your screen, and highlight it with a rectangle.
   
   
   
5. After you're satisfied with the selected area, you can find a little window with coordinates at the bottom-left of your screen.
   You'll need to manually select and copy to the clipboard only the bbox tag with the coordinates.

   <bbox e="##" n="##" s="##" w="##"/>

   
   
   
6. Find the BBox-tool prompt window mentioned at the start of this guide and click OK.
   
   
   
7. If you've followed the steps above correctly, your Taho will fill out the coordinates by itself.
   
   
   
8. Specify the folder where you want the tiles to be downloaded, or leave it default.
   
   
   
9. Pick Pixel map provider by selecting options from the source dropdown menu.
   For this example, we will use Mapnik(de) because it doesn't require any additional API keys.
   
   You can pick other options, but they may require you to register for their use on the main pages. 
   Overlays and Kal.-Files are fully optional and are not required, you can leave them blank.
   
   
10. Set up the Zoomlevel. The higher the level of zoom, the more detailed the map will be.
    Take note, that more high zoom layers mean more PNG files, a bigger size of the offline map, and will take exponentially longer to download from the tile server.
    As a general rule of thumb, the bigger the area – the less zoom layers are advised.
    
    

11. Change File type to PNG, everything else should be left default:

    
    
    
12. Now you're all set and ready to start downloading the tiles with the make maps button at the top-left of your Taho window.
    
    Follow the progress bar to know when it's done.
    
    

13. Open the SmartPTT Dispatcher Console. Go to Map → Open Street Map → Settings.

    For example, the folder with a map file has this path: C:\Downloads\osmAnd. OsmAnd is a folder with subfolders of map level (0, 1, 2...). Copy this path and paste it into the appeared window.
    

    NOTE! The last symbol should be "\". So, it means that the final path would be:

    C:\Downloads\osmAnd\
    
    

14. Map -> Open Street Map

NOTE!

Usually, in case the map does have not the correct Zoom level and you will see nothing except white color inside the map window. Don't panic! Just try to zoom it out using your mouse scroll. Scroll it until you see a small map that you can zoom in on correctly.

 

If you have any issues with Offline map creation, please send a request to support@smartptt.com.
Thank you!