October 2007
The following error message appears:
(gtkroadmap:3487): WARNING **: Invalid UTF8 string passed to pango_layout_set_text()
The symptom is that all of a sudden a long straight line that you know isn't really present will appear from edge to edge of your screen.
Periodics seem to be attached to windows (?), so the new periodic started in roadmap_display_initialize() doesn't commence since there's no window yet.
No signal handling has been added to the QT versions. This means user changes to routes and waypoints, and the track log, can easily be lost.
(The GTK versions handle signals properly, and so RoadMap will shut down cleanly in the event of the user hitting ^C in the window from which RoadMap was started, or if RoadMap is killed with SIGTERM, as when the system is shutting down.)
It would be great if someone could finish that work. And win32 hasn't even been attempted in cross-compilation. Using a cross-compiler has big advantages for the principal developers, so please don't just toss that notion aside without some discussion.
Both flavors of GTK build make fairly heavy use of deprecated API pieces. Someone with good GTK skills should clean these up.
If you get too close to either the north or south pole, RoadMap will get confused, and may crash. If you go past the 180th meridian, in either direction, RoadMap may or may not get confused, but you probably will.
The Tiger files define polygons as delineated by a list of lines. Any of these lines might be defined by a serie of shape points.
RoadMap uses the shape points when drawing the lines, but not when filling the polygons.
The roadmap files include a table to convert a place into a county subdivision. This table causes a lot of problems because places can span across county subdivisions, with name clashes.
Since the automatic selection of the map, because the file usdir.rdm does not have yet any ZIP code location information (TBD).
This feature has been hidden from the user interface for now.
A few street address conflicts appears when building maps. Some seems to be a TIGER map database problem. Others might be caused by the address range format issue (see below). A few still need to be investigated.
NOTE: 3 of these addresses conflicts have been confirmed to be TIGER database errors by the census bureau.
Some street numbers include letters, which is not well supported by RoadMap: in such a case, roadmap generates a street number which is hoped to be unique enough by converting the letter into a "number".
This is a design problem that is not going to be solved any time soon. Current kludge is deemed good enough for the time being, until someone give a practical case where this does not work.
For example: Woodland Hills (in Los Angeles county). This is a TIGER file problem: the string "WOODLAND HILLS" never appears in the LA county files.
The offset can be significant (a few hundred feet), making these maps basically unusable for navigation. The USGS bureau has announced that their maps of Hawaii are being redone using the NAD83 datum, lets hope the US Census Bureau will do the same. [As of 2007, I don't know whether this is still true. -pgf]