Names and renamingUsing GPSMan in graphical modeLaunching GPSManBasic concepts

Basic concepts

Here is a list of a few terms that will be used below.

Waypoints, routes, tracks and laps are examples of data used in GPS receivers.

Route stages are the parts of a route between each two consecutive waypoints. Route stages are called edges in Graph Theory, legs in aviation, and links by Garmin. At present, GPSMan deals with three data fields for each stage: a comment, a label (that will appear in the map), and hidden information.

Data items refer to the elements stored in the GPSMan data-base. Apart from the data items used in GPS receivers GPSMan also works with

Track and polyline segments are subdivisions that, in the case of tracks, normally indicate that there were time gaps in which the receiver got no position information. The representation in the map of a track or polyline having different segments is a polygonal line that is interrupted between each segment (segments with a single point will hardly be visible). Segments are defined by their starting points and in the track or polyline edit window it is possible to mark or unmark each point (except the first) as being a segment starter.

Comments and remarks (NB) can be specified for some types of items. The difference between them is that comments can be got from and put into the GPS receiver, while remarks are only kept by the interface and may be saved to and loaded from GPSMan files. The characters allowed in a comment, as well as its size, depend on what the receiver accepts with the exception that GPSMan will replace any newline by a space. In remarks the only constraint is that no blank lines are allowed.

A map background image name can be associated to each data item except for laps and groups, so that when the item is displayed on the map window the named image is automatically loaded if the map is empty. See below for the details.

Forgetting a data item means deleting it permanently from the data-base.

Input/Output operations in GPSMan have the following names (see below for the definitions of the GPSMan file formats):


GPSMan User Manual
Copyright 1998-2013 Miguel Filgueiras,

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Names and renamingUsing GPSMan in graphical modeLaunching GPSManBasic concepts