TOP50: German/Austrian/Swiss Topographic Maps Format

german Deutsche Version

NEWS: 2008/09/06 After complaints by the authors of the Geogrid-Viewer about this website I decided to withdraw the decoder from the website until the legal situation has been cleared.


Top50 is the official  government topographic map for Germany, Austria and Switzerland at a scale of 1:50000

For Germany it comes on 13 CDs which you can e.g. buy at: http://www.adv-online.de/produkte/top50/
For Austria the maps are available at http://www.bev.gv.at/
For Switzerland at http://www.swisstopo.ch/

The CDs come with the Geogrid Viewer software for MSWindows developed by Dornier EADS .
They also hold a strange patent on the display of digitized maps, see
GeoGrid: Public data behind patented+undocumented vendorlock format

The maps on the CDs are simple scans of the original paper sheets, but they are stored in binary *.mph files, containing
auxiliary information, and binary *.mpr files containing the image data.
The format seems to be a propriety format of  Dornier and is not identical to the Ilwis MPR format.

Usage of  Maps on Linux and GPS devices

Since there is no viewer for the maps for Linux (though there seems to have been one for Geogrid V1)
there are two options to convert the maps into a common image format.

1)  Use the Windows Viewer  which comes with the CDs and print large tiles to bitmaps using
an image printer (for example the Zan image printer: http://www.zan1011.com/).
The maximal tile size you can print depends on the memory of your computer.
With 512MB you can print about an A2 300dpi Tiff file containing about 80000 points in UTM
longitude and 50000 in latitude. You can then crop the white borders of the image using any
image tool and convert the image to PNG with about 8000x6000 pixels.
But this is a rather tedious procedure.

2) Use a decoder of the MPH/MPR format to produce PNG files.
I have written such a decoder using  the graphics language IDL (www.rsinc.com -
 rumour has it that you can find cracks for IDL on common crack servers, IDL 5.2 or higher should be sufficient).
This language is rather like Basic/Fortran and the software can easily be translated into any other language with PNG support.
If there is a need I could also make an intercative version of MPR2PNG which
would run with the licensefree IDL6 virtual machine.
Now here is the software with a description of the file format: MPR2PNG
The software produces a set of PNG files with user-definable overlap and
a list of UTM/pixel pairs for the calibration in a separate file. Thus the PNG files
can be directly used by QPEGPS .

Note that usage of the converter is strictly for non-commercial purposes only.
Commercial GPS vendors should contact Dornier for a converter and a license.

Comments on specific maps

Currently the MPR2PNG converter has been tested on following map files: (as of 12 Dec 2004, V1.4)

Bundesland
 Map Name
 Version
 Comment: Pixel/Coordinate pair
Brandenburg
 bb050
 V4
 decodable, not yet calibrated
Brandenburg
 bb200
 V4
 decodable, not yet calibrated
Hessen
 he050
 V4
 works:[10310l,9996l,28919l,40213l]/[454000d,5691000d,547000d,5540000d]UTM32 WGS84
Hessen
 he200
 V4
 works:[1252l,300l,23659l,28312l]/[390000d,5760000d,670000d,5410000d]UTM32 WGS84
Niedersachsen
 lgn50
 V3
 works:[4275,9188;61498,57806]/[348000,5942000;635000,5699000]UTM32 WGS84
Niedersachsen lgn200
 V3
 works:[2938,8504;34389,28591]/[311000,5931000;704000,5680000]UTM32 WGS84
NRW
 nrw050
 V4
 works:[20003,5227;42214,40641]/[364000,5806000;475000,5629000]UTM32 WGS84
NRW
 nrw200
 V4
 works:[1726,247;23335,28533]/[300000,5850000;570000,5500000]UTM32 WGS84
Sachsen-Anhalt
 lsa200
 V4
 works:[540,1152;2943,29152]/[570000,5940000;600000,5590000]Gauss Meridian 12
Sachsen-Anhalt lsa050
 V3?
 problems: file contains filling zeroes, also record decoding problems.
Germany
 d1000
 V3
 decodable but calibration easier by method 1. (Lambert Conical)
Austria East
 a50ost
 V2
 decodable, calibrated, no maps.txt format yet
Austria West
 a50west
 V2
 decoding problems, not yet calibrated
Austria 500
 a500
 V2
 decodable, calibrated, no maps.txt format yet
Austria 200
 a200ost
 V2
 decoding problems, not yet calibrated
Austria 200
 a200west
 V2
 decoding problems, not yet calibrated

The Pixel/Coordinate pair defines a calibration of the map by two points and their rectangular coordinates.
The MPH files also contain a 1-point calibration but sofar the MPR2PNG can not read additional parameters
necessary for high precision calibration. That is why I introduced the additional calibration points above.

  Dec2004
markus@mfraenz.de