What is Mapster?

Mapster is a simple graphical application that generates client-side image maps for web pages. After loading an existing web-ready image, you use the mouse to draw areas on the image. Mapster reads the coordinates and generates a text file with the coordinates of all the areas written as HTML tags. Emacs users may be interested to know that I have provided (minimal) e-lisp support for using Mapster as a helper app to Emacs/PSGML. Mapster is free software, released under the GNU General Public License.

Please note that this is an alpha release; it has not been extensively tested and undoubtedly has a number of bugs.

Thanks ...

to Bob Apthorpe for pointing out several important bugs in version 0.1.

Requirements

OS

The current version of Mapster is limited to UNIX/Linux platforms. Future versions will also run on Windows and Macintosh.

Tcl/Tk

Mapster is written in the Tcl language, so you need to have the Tcl/Tk packages installed. It has only been tested with Tcl/Tk 8.0, but may work with earlier versions.

If you need to use JPEG, PNG, or TIFF images:

Of the image formats used on the Web, standard Tk supports only GIF. There are two ways to load other formats in mapster. If you install the Img extension for Tk, then you should be able to load the above formats automatically in mapster and other Tcl/Tk programs. Otherwise, you should install a command-line image conversion utility. I use and recommend convert, from the ImageMagick suite.

Look before you leap

Screenshots, anyone?

A mapster session ...

... and the result.

What you can and can't do with Mapster

You can ...

load an existing GIF image; with the Img extension or a suitable image converter (which you must obtain separately), you can also import JPEG, PNG, and TIFF images.

draw rectangles, circles, and polygons on top of an image.

move them.

delete them.

change the color of drawn objects, as well as the background, from dark to light and vice-versa, for visibility.

give each area a descriptive name, which becomes the ALT text for the AREA tag.

using the e-lisp code in htmlx.el, you can use Mapster as a helper application when writing HTML with Emacs/PSGML (if this is all Greek to you, don't worry about it).

You can't ...

create the actual image for your image map, or edit it in any way. All Mapster really does is find the coordinates of the shapes you draw, and spits them out in HTML-ified form.

do any fancy HTML tricks.

More information!

Users' Guide

Changes in current version

Known bugs and limitations

To-do list

Download

mapster v0.2.2 (compressed tar archive, 32kb)