Need a little more info about the 90 A4 map sections. Are these physical and real and then scanned images that you need to fit up ? Or is it a pre-existing collection of JPG's or PNG's etc that you need to make into a view. I'm guessing the latter since you know the file size of the collection.
Are they all exactly the same size images and what pixel size is each. ViewingDale has a maximum image resolution of 2048x2048 pixels but there is an app called the ImageSplitter which is shipped with it that will take larger images and turn them into a patchwork of smaller tiled images and it creates all the icons necessary so that when you view it, its all in one space joined back up.
There is another app shipped with it which is the batch image to VMI image format converter which will take a directory of images and create ViewingDale formatted versions of them in one go. So all 90 can be converted together. It does not however create all the icons for them tho.
As you know I do MeDem and we have a tiled array of 40x40 images to make 1600 tiles and each are 1024x1024 tiles making up our 40K square map. We have three layers of that so in total it has 4800 tiles for a 40,000 pixel square map so the app can cope with it so long as your graphics card can handle the large amount of data going through it.
The missing bit you need is to get icon files for all the VMI images that you need to make up the map. We do this with Perl since the icons are only small text files containing the position, scale, image to use and some sundries like flips and rotations. Since I have some code lying about to our maps I think it should be easy for me to modify one of them to create your tile set.
So what you need to do is the following:
a) Get all of your images together into one directory.
b) Run the batch image converter and get them all into VMI format somewhere within the ViewingDale images directory.
c) Tell me the original aspect ratio of the images before conversion. I.e. if A4 then width is 1.414 x height in portrait mode. So give me the original width and heights of the images. If you want it to exact scale then I need to know that too. What physical distance is one pixel on the image.
d) Tell me where in the ViewingDale/Images directory you put the VMI images and what prefix you used. I.e. C:\ViewingDale\Images\Montage\Img_X2_Y3.vmi
e) Tell me where you would like your Icons. I.e. C:\ViewingDale\Icons\Montage
and then ill write a script to put them all together.
To be honest it is quite a demanding task that your asking for. You may find that in several areas of the processing or viewing you will run up quite a lot of RAM or HDD space. ViewingDales VMI format is compressed but like PNG's it is lossless and so offers a factor of maybe 4:1 drop in size unlike JPG where it could be 10:1 or 20:1. I.e. if your originals were in JPG format as opposed to BMP then you could find the VMI's being quite a lot larger than the originals. If they were in BMP then they would become smaller. The compression ratio depends a lot on what the picture on the images looked like. If line drawing then it could be very small but if hand drawn or satellite photo then much less so.
If you have the capability of uploading the originals to some web site or FTP then I could grab them and do the processing for you and give you back the VMI's and icons.
I dont think anybody can view one image as 20Kx30K. Even with my 64bit machine and with a 64bit image viewer it tops out at about 20K. To be honest, any app viewing images over about 10K is pushing it. I know photoshop have large image formats but like ViewingDale these are working with tiled sections and paging in smaller areas of the image at a time. Also, no app can deal with JPG images as compressed files whilst editing them. They all would uncompress them into RAM before dealing with them. The data in compressed form bears no resemblance to pixels and cannot be worked upon. You would not be able to assemble JPGs and do it within a RAM limit of the sum of the JPG file sizes. You would have to multiply the X x Y x number x 4 bytes which would be something like 5Gb.
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