fictional Google street maps

[SeerBlue]

this page http://maps.huge.info/trace.htm would give you all the coordinates, but it would involve clicking alot to draw a city map, and then the data would have to be modified to put into an xml (or other file format) to include names for the specific line, and change colors, and so on. and keeping track of which line was which street would be difficult.
Illustrator is probably the better route.
I am really curious now, as your fictional city has a real world location, were you intending to display it in google maps, or just looking to see if it could be leveraged to draw it.

As far as saving a nickel, Qgis is free, and with plugins will allow digitizing shape/vector files. And you could load your area of New Jersey from a WMS server to trace over,,,,I am sure someone has mapped New Jersey by now

But that would be back to drawing.

[töff]

as your fictional city has a real world location, were you intending to display it in google maps, or just looking to see if it could be leveraged to draw it.

It's been 2 flippin' years since I did any werk on this particular backburner project ... http://www.cityofsupers.com/cgi-bin/...2236#POST52236 ... but yeh, I thought a Google map would neat. The wet dream, of course, would be to hack GoogleMaps itself (or integrate my custom map into their basic US streetmap site), so it's a seamless match between Prodigy, NJ and the rest of the country.

As far as saving a nickel, Qgis is free,

Sorry, I meant in terms of learning curve and werktime investment.

[Alistair]

Well what you want can be done if you have the resources at your disposal. At work I make regular use of Mapserver to generate map layers that create roads maps based on US Census Bureau Tiger Shapes. This could be mimicked with ease if you can export your roads as a shape file. Alternatively you could generate them using a postGIS database containing the geographic lines for your roads and the names. If going from the database method you'd want to break your roads into chunks so that the labels will appear more than once on a given map.

With MapServer you can then load your layer into OpenLayers as a WMS layer.

If you can't get MapServer and are willing to give up the names on the roads I can help you out with loading the roads into OpenLayers as vector layers and even using OpenLayers to generate the WKT (well-known text) that you'd need to import the data into OpenLayers by default. I've only just begun to touch OpenLayers for RPG mapping, but recently finished implementing it where I work for mapping farm fields. The nice thing about OpenLayers is you can sign up to use Google Maps and make use of its background imagery in your own mapping applications or use Yahoo's or even Microsoft's mapping data. I've already implemented maps pulling data from NASA directly (very low resolution there unfortunately) and the US Navy for sailing charts.

If enough people are interested OpenLayers may be worth having its own thread here.