Converting GPS (.gtm/.gpx) to flash/illustrator

September 20, 2006 4:19 AM

Is there a simple way of converting a GPS Trackmaker file (or .gpx) to an Illustrator or Flash file?

Been a bit 0wned by my boss, as he was walking out the door to go on holiday he asks me to convert a GPS Trackmaker file into an animated Flash of the paths taken. Its a journey from the UK to Antartica with some dilly dallying around there. I think.

So, so far I exported the .gtm from Trackmaker to a .gpx file, which I was able to then convert to .svg using GPSVisualizer.

But this is still no use and its .svg and flash or illustrator.

Now this chap has written a perl script that converts .gpx to illustrator but it only works for things in the UK (and didnt work at all for me).

Any of you guys ever done anything like this?

(having one of those, "everyday people convert .gtm files to animated flash movies with no problem, but when I try its like I'm stuck in a googling file extensions loop" mornings)

posted by 13twelve to computers & internet (3 comments total)

If you can't import .svg into Illustrator and go from there, what is the world coming to? Isn't SVG an Adobe thing?

Is there something else you're trying to do that an import in to Illustrator won't work?
posted by yellowbkpk at 5:17 AM on September 20, 2006

SVG is an open source format that is XML based. I would think that it should easily be imported into Illustrator. I'm almost positive Illustrator supports SVG export. SVG can be animated though, so I don't know why you don't just use it exclusively and go that route. It is pretty powerful and fun to work with.
posted by JJ86 at 5:50 AM on September 20, 2006

Illustrator definitely does SVG. Unless GPSVisualizer produces some sort of borked bastard version of svg...

I just love bosses who blithely toss-out orders with absolutely no knowledge of what they are asking.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:15 AM on September 20, 2006