Is there a way of automatically generating a HTML-Map compatible list of coordinates of polygon-like objects (e.g. countries on a map) with very distinctive borders?
Example image:
Map of CEE countries http://www.bankaustria.at/landkarten/CEE_2007_w524.jpg
Final output:
<map id ='ceemap' name='ceemap'> <area shape='poly' coords='149,303,162,301,162,298,171,293,180,299,169,309,159,306,148,306,149,303' href='austria.html' target ='_blank' alt='Austria' /> <!-- ... --> </map> Any tools/scripts extracting the coordinates of a polygon-like selection would be helpful.
Open the map in Inkscape. If it is a bitmap, use Path -> Trace Bitmap to trace the edges. Clean up the vector data to include only the paths that you want to appear in your imagemap. Save the document, I suggest to a POVRay file. Now you have a list of vertices (and plenty of markup or metadata that you don’t care about) in a plain text format. Converting from that to the requisite HTML syntax is still a problem, but not nearly as complex as the first step.
For what it is worth, there is a long standing feature request for Inkscape to include an option to export HTML image maps.