CartoType makes drawing maps simple. It is a powerful cartographic engine that can be used by your application to draw any kind of map you need, on any platform from a mobile phone to a mainframe, in any style. It can find the best route from one place to another, taking road types and access restrictions into account.
CartoType uses advanced graphical and typographic techniques to deliver professional cartography. Maps on computer screens can and should be as good as printed maps. CartoType draws all its graphics elements using scalable vector techniques, not scanned bitmaps. This allows the maps to be displayed at any size at the same quality. Anti-aliasing, transparency and filters are used where appropriate. A library of map projections is available, and pre-projected data can also be used.
The CartoType API (application programming interface) is designed to be as easy to use as possible. In general, it is impossible to construct a badly-formed object, and once an object exists, all functions of that object's class can be called in any order.
CartoType is written in a portable subset of standard C++. It does not use exception handling or run-time type information (RTTI). It requires no external library support (that is, it does not use the C standard library or any other library) except for certain plug-in components which can, if necessary, be replaced by versions that do not use external libraries. For reasons of speed optimization on small devices like mobile phones, CartoType does not use any floating-point arithmetic. All arithmetic and trigonometry is performed using CartoType's own fixed-point routines.
CartoType has already been implemented for the following compilers and operating systems:
For a given screen size in pixels, using the same data, CartoType produces identical results, regardless of compiler and operating system, except for differences in color resolution caused by differing display modes.
CartoType was built using unit testing from day one. It uses a rigorous programming methodology that makes bugs and memory leaks extremely rare, and easy to find and fix when they occur. CartoType will not crash, or leak memory, under low-memory conditions, but will degrade gracefully and return error codes to the caller. The CartoType developers come from a background of developing software for platforms like the Symbian OS, in which memory leaks and defects are not tolerated.
CartoType can be connected to your product relatively easily.
We can help with any of these stages, and provide continuing support if necessary. If you prefer to go it alone, CartoType is delivered as well-formatted C++ source code with plentiful comments, including the documentation comments that are used to generate the CartoType documentation.
CartoType can be licensed for a single fee that will generally be much lower than the cost of developing equivalent software in-house. CartoType's ease of use and reliability make the cost of ownership lower than for most licensed software libraries.