Kompass (.tk)
A .tk file is a track from Kompass, the Alpine hiking-map publisher — the tour data that goes with its printed and digital maps.
At a glance
| Extension | .tk |
| Encoding | text |
| By | Kompass Karten GmbH, Innsbruck, Austria |
History
Kompass is a map publisher first and a software house second. It was founded in December 1953 by Heinz Fleischmann as Fleischmann KG - KOMPASS Karten, became Fleischmann & Mair in 1968 when Mairs Geografischer Verlag took a stake, and has been Kompass Karten GmbH since 1996, when it became part of the MairDumont group. Since 2002 the Tyrolean hiking-map publisher Walter Mayr has belonged to Kompass as well. The company is based in Innsbruck, Austria. Note that 1953 is the publisher's founding date; the file format itself carries no published date.
Where it is used
The format belongs to Kompass's digital products and its outdoor and hiking-map app, which offers offline maps, tour planning and GPX handling. Its natural territory is the Alps: Austria, South Tyrol and Germany, alongside a catalogue of roughly a thousand printed titles.
Structure
A Kompass .tk file is a plain-text, line-based track log — one record per line, read top to bottom. It carries the track and nothing more: no route structure, no nested folders and no sensor channels.
How widespread
Regional rather than global, and strongest exactly where Kompass maps are the default on the shelf. Converting to GPX is the usual reason anyone opens one, since general-purpose GPS software does not read .tk.
RouteConverter support
| Reads | Kompass |
| Writes | Kompass |