Manusized Mapit

By Manus Hand (not surprisingly)

What Is It?

What you can get here is the "Manusized" version of the mapit program, and "Manusized" .ps template files.

Manusized maps incorporate two improvements over non-Manusized version:

The color maps are, well, color. Land is brown and sea is blue. (The non-Manusized mapit version's color maps are black-and-white, with only the units colored.)
The supply center dots are colored to reflect each one's current owner. That is, if England owns a center, it will be shown as dark blue.

How It Came To Be

I originally created this version of mapit to assist in the display of the Payola variant games that I run, since it is more common in those games to have unusual ownership situations (stuff like Turkey owning Liverpool, Paris, Ankara, and nothing else, despite his three units being in Ukraine, North Africa, and Prussia).

But of course, the colored supply center dot feature is very handy even in non-Payola games, and so I was often urged to "release" my version to the public. I resisted this at first because the code was kind of jammed into the released Mapit program code (more important, my Manusized mapit program had become incompatible with some of the existing mapit .ps files, attempting to color all SC's, even when it was fed .ps files that did not know how to do so).

Enter Thomas Kuhlmann, who begged me for the code, and then helped me make it backward compatible to the pre-existing (non-Manusized) .ps files. At that point, the code (thanks to Thomas) detected when you were using a Manusized map file, and only attempted to color the supply centers if you were indeed using such a Manusized file (the backward compatibility problem.

And Then...

Much later, as part of the development of the DPjudge, I completely rewrote mapit (which was written in the C programming language) in Python as a separate but integrated module for the DPjudge. This module, called dpmap, also serves as a standalone executable just as the mapit program did, and this is the Manusized map-maker program that I now have available for download here. Over the years, with the DPjudge's mapmaking needs growing, the Python version was enhanced, and the C language one wasn't. For this reason, the C code is no longer available for download here.

The dpmap program requires Manusized .ps files for input, so it lacks all the parameter bells and whistles added by Thomas to the C language mapit program. Even so, dpmap is now much more full-featured than mapit was. I like it much much better and you probably will too. If you do not have a Python interpreter to support your running it, let me know; I will put a compiled version up here for people like you.

The Manusized Maps

By now you have gotten the idea that there is not only new code that makes up the dpmap (Manusized mapit) program, but that (to take advantage of the new features) you also need to feed the program a Manusized .ps map file (that is, different from the version of the .ps file provided with the mapit distribution). So far, I have put together some of the Manusized color map files, and Mario Huys and Juho Snellman have contributed a great many more. For a couple of the ones I created, I just took the .ps file distributed with standard mapit and made changes to its PostScript code. For some of the others, I used -- oh geez, what is it? mapper? mapmaker? one of those David Norman brand products -- to make a map, and then made changes to its PostScript output.

What I'm saying is that if you want to create a Manusized version of a map not listed below, one way to do so is to take the existing mapit map and go to town with its PostScript contents. Going to town isn't all that hard anymore (and someday creating Manusized maps from scratch will be very easy, thanks to programming being created, but that is all I will say). Write me if you need to know how to Manusize a non-Manusized map, although I freely admit that I may just refer you to far more knowledgeable sources, Mario Huys and Juho Snellman, who, as you will see, have created some very beautiful Manusized maps -- both from pre-existing mapit maps, and also from scratch. Thanks, Mario and Juho!!

Okay, with no further ado, here is what you need to get yourself a Manusized mapit. Hold down the Shift key while clicking to save each of these files to your disk. Then they're all yours. Enjoy!

dpmap.py (Python language version)

PostScript File Author Remarks standard.ps Manus Hand Lowe Judge: regular. Supports 1898, etc. 1900.ps Mario Huys aberration.ps Mario Huys ancmed.ps Juho Snellman brazilian.ps Manus Hand britain.ps Manus Hand canton.ps Mario Huys chaos.ps Mario Huys chromatic.ps Juho Snellman classical.ps Juho Snellman Lowe Judge: classicf crowded.ps Manus Hand empire.ps Mario Huys fiveman.ps Manus Hand hundred.ps Juho Snellman Lowe Judge: hundred3 imperial.ps Mario Huys loeb9.ps Mario Huys milan.ps Mario Huys minorpower.ps Manus Hand modern.ps Manus Hand pure.ps Mario Huys renaissance.ps Manus Hand sailho.ps Juho Snellman Lowe Judge: sailho2 v8.ps Manus Hand void.ps Mario Huys youngstown.ps Mario Huys

What you can do if you appreciate this:

Make me a new .ps file (or two, or three...) to add to the collection!

Mail me about Manusized Mapit at [email protected]