Digimap Carto: A last look before we turn off the lights

At 11:00 am access to Digimap Carto will be closed and by 12:00 noon it will have made its last map. Carto was at the cutting edge of web mapping technology for several years, delivering Ordnance Survey maps to thousands of users while Google was still just a search engine.  The high quality EPS and then PDF print files it produced meant that staff, students and researchers could print out maps of anywhere in Great Britain and were no longer limited to their library’s collection.

How Carto has changed since 1998

Carto over the years 1998 to 2013

As time passed Carto could easily keep up with the latest offerings from MultiMap (later bought by Microsoft and eventually becoming Bing Maps) and Google Maps. It had more advanced tools and much better data in the form of OS MasterMap, so as the Java updates got more frequent we all put up with the software being a bit unreliable for a few days before we could issue a fix. However after 2011 the number of Java updates ramped up significantly and the changes became more difficult to accommodate. Once anti-virus software began seeing Carto as a potential threat and preventing it operating we decided that maintenance was unsustainable.

EDINA realised that continuing to support Carto would be too costly in terms of developer time spent fixing problems rather than improving and enhancing the service. In the meantime the rest of the world had become much more accustomed to viewing maps online in a web browser; EDINA’s other mapping service, Roam was able to take on much of what Carto was offering without confusing or frustrating its users.

Some recent changes to the capabilities of the web mapping platform that Roam uses meant that we could finally offer a Carto replacement without the need for any software to run on the end user’s computer. These changes have allowed us to withdraw Carto and let Roam to take on all the mapping duties for Digimap. We can now get on with the business of all those improvements and enhancements we have been wanting to make. We hope you will like the changes that we are aiming to have in place this August:

Digimap Roam Interfaces: Important changes this summer

Farewell Carto!

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Digimap Roam gets Carto features

We have introduced a raft of new print options to Digimap Roam;  some of these were previously only available in Carto, others are new altogether:Select your print scale in Digimap Roam

Select your own scale for the printed map (within sensible limits)
Print OS MasterMap at up to 1:100 scale (Carto’s limit is 1:500)
Print at paper sizes up to A0
Print landscape or portrait orientations (not available in Carto)

The new print options along with the formats already available mean that printing from Roam is now more flexible and powerful than Carto.

We have also added an extra zoom level to Roam’s screen maps called Building View. This shows OS MasterMap at around 1:500,  making it easier to add detailed annotations such as new buildings to your map.

OS MasterMap Views in Digimap Roam

© Crown copyright/database right 2013. Ordnance Survey/EDINA supplied service.
FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY
Scales shown are the default print scales, screen map scale varies depending on the pixel size of your monitor / device.

With these enhancements Roam can now perform many of the tasks previously only possible with Carto.

Unfortunately, Carto has become difficult to maintain and needs to be replaced. These changes to Roam, along with some extra features planned for the coming months, will enable it to take the place of Carto. Once all the enhancements to Roam are made we will retire Carto completely; we intend to do this at the end of July 2013.

If you have any concerns about the withdrawal of Carto then please let us know:

  • Email: edina@ed.ac.uk
  • Tel: 0131 650 3302

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Carto not working in Mozilla Firefox?

Carto Start Page

If you use Mozilla’s Firefox as your browser then you may not be able to access Digimap’s Carto application.  The reason for this is that Mozilla is now (from the 30th August 2012) automatically blocking Java.  The reason that Mozilla has taken this stance is that a Java exploit has been added to the notorious Blackhole exploit toolkit.  In simple terms, running Java applications through your browser opens your machine up to hackers, and we dont want that.

We are working on Carto’s successor which we hope to launch in 2013 and this will not rely on Java.  If you need to use Carto, then it will still work in Internet Explorer and Chrome browsers. Hopefully Java will patch the breach soon and it will work again in Firefox.

For more information about this security issue please read this.

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