More online maps

The map list in the Maps dialog is not built into the program — it is a catalog that RouteConverter downloads once at startup and then offers under the Online tab. New maps that appear in the catalog show up after the next start, without an update of the program itself.

Where the catalog comes from

On startup RouteConverter downloads the catalogs to the application's tileservers directory:

• https://api.routeconverter.com/v1/mapservers/?format=xml → mapservers.xml
• https://api.routeconverter.com/v1/overlayservers/?format=xml → overlayservers.xml

mapservers.xml holds the online maps offered under the Online tab; overlayservers.xml holds the overlays drawn on top of them. Both files are plain XML on disk — they can be inspected with any text editor.

Adding your own map servers

Power users can extend the catalog locally: add a <mapServer> entry with id, name, minZoom and maxZoom, a urlPattern and a <copyright> line to mapservers.xml in the tileservers directory, and the map appears in the Online tab at the next start. Any tile server in the ArcGIS or Google style can be wired this way — an example from the announcement thread is an "ArcGIS Satellite" entry with maxZoom 19, whose tiles above zoom 19 report "Data not available yet".

ArcGIS Satellite and Google Satellite themselves came through this route: they were added to the central catalog server-side in 2019 and since then download like every other entry.

Older versions

The local catalog files written before version 2.25 use a format that is no longer supported — since the 2.25 restructure the catalogs are downloaded from the API, and only HTTPS tile servers are accepted.

See also

The dialog that lists the maps — The Maps dialog