Introduction To Rulesets

Contents

A ruleset is a collection of Maperitive rendering rules stored in a file. You can edit these rules to change how the map is displayed.

Built-in Rulesets

Maperitive comes with several built-in rulesets:

Default Ruleset

The default ruleset draws a map similarily to Mapnik layer on OpenStreetMap web site. When you start Maperitive, this is the ruleset that is used to display the data.

Wireframe Ruleset

The wireframe ruleset draws all of the map data using a simple wireframe style. All line features are drawn as simple thin lines. All areas are drawn as green polygons. This ruleset is useful when you want to identify map elements which are not yet covered by some other ruleset (the default ruleset, for example, shows only a subset of the OSM features).

Google Maps Ruleset

The Google Maps ruleset draws a map similarily to Google Maps.

Hiking Ruleset

This ruleset draws a hiking map. The map style resembles that of paper hiking maps produced by Alpine Association of Slovenia.

Switching Between Rulesets

In order to use the wireframe ruleset, you have to tell Maperitive to use it:

use-ruleset alias=googlemaps
apply-ruleset

The first command, use-ruleset, instructs Maperitive to activate a ruleset with an alias googlemaps. Activation merely tells Maperitive that all future map sources loaded should use Google Maps rules. In order to apply the Google Maps ruleset to already loaded map sources, you have to execute the apply-ruleset command.

Can you guess how to switch back to default rules? It's simple:

use-ruleset alias=default
apply-ruleset

Ruleset Aliases

As you can see from the examples above, rulesets can have aliases. The built-in rulesets come with already specified aliases. You can assign your own aliases to your own rulesets. All very nice, but how do I write my own rulesets? you may ask. Well, let's see.

Creating Your Own Rulesets

The first step is to create a new text file, let's say Rules/MyOwn.mrules (it doesn't have to be in the Rules directory, but it's a nice place to store the rules).

The second step involves the actual writing of rules in the file. For more information about this, visit Rendering Rules Introduction. We can skip this step by simply copying the contents of some other ruleset file to our own MyOwn.mrules. I'll copy the contents from the wireframe ruleset:

features
	lines
		all lines : 
	areas
		all areas : 
properties
	map-background-color : #181818
rules
	target : all areas
		define
			fill-color : green
			fill-opacity : 0.1
		draw : fill
	target : all lines
		define
			line-color : lightgray
			line-width : 0.5
		draw : line

I'll change the line width to something thicker, just to see the difference:

			line-width : 5

Now we tell Maperitive to load our ruleset and apply them to our map:

use-ruleset location=Rules/Hiking.mrules
apply-ruleset

If everything is OK, you should see a map similar to this: ##image

Congratulations, you have now registered your first own ruleset!

Listing Registered Rulesets

Once registered, your ruleset(s) will be stored in your user settings so you can reuse them the next time you use Maperitive. To get a list of all registered rulesets, type the command

list-rulesets

Maperitive's response should be something like

1: D:\Programs\Maperitive\Rules\Default.mrules (default)
2: D:\Programs\Maperitive\Rules\Wireframe.mrules (wireframe)
3: D:\Programs\Maperitive\Rules\GoogleMaps.mrules (googlemaps)
4: Rules/MyOwn.mrules - ACTIVE
Done

You can get some information from this list:

Assigning Aliases

As mentioned before, you can assign aliases to your own rulesets. Let's assign an alias to MyOwn.mrules:

use-ruleset location=Rules/MyOwn.mrules as-alias=myrules

Now our list looks like this:

1: D:\Programs\Maperitive\Rules\Default.mrules (default)
2: D:\Programs\Maperitive\Rules\Wireframe.mrules (wireframe)
3: D:\Programs\Maperitive\Rules\GoogleMaps.mrules (googlemaps)
4: Rules/MyOwn.mrules (myrules) - ACTIVE
Done

Notice "(myrules)" text - this is the alias we used.

Why Aliases?

Why do I need aliases, you may ask? Well, because you can then reference your rulesets regardless of the location of the ruleset file. For example, we can write a script like this one:

load-source mymap.osm
use-ruleset alias=myrules
apply-ruleset

And it will work even if we later moved the location of myrules ruleset to somewhere else (in future version you will even be able to store rules on the web). As long as your rules are registered using the new location, your scripts should work fine.

Changing Aliases

You can change the alias of your registered ruleset at any time, example:

use-ruleset index=4 as-alias=newalias

This commands assigns the newalias alias to fourth registered ruleset. You can also reassign the alias from one ruleset to another using the same technique.

NOTE: You cannot use or change aliases for built-in rulesets.

Removing Rulesets

remove-ruleset (TODO) command allows you to remove (unregister) a particular ruleset. Don't worry, the rules file will not be deleted. Example:

remove-ruleset alias=sameoldstuff

will remove a ruleset with the alias sameoldstuff.

See also:

TO BE CONTINUED

See also: