placemark / placemark

A flexible web-based editor, converter, visualization tool, for geospatial data

Placemark

This is the open source project Placemark, which was previously a SaaS app. Placemark is a tool for creating, editing, and visualizing map data, in a variety of formats including GeoJSON, KML, Shapefiles, CSV, and many more.

This is a monorepo and it contains multiple subprojects:

Subprojects

• Play is the free-to-use interface accessible at play.placemark.io. It has no server backend or map storage, but it supports all other features.
• Placemark-app is a simplified version of the Placemark SaaS app that supports server storage and realtime sync and collaboration.
• The SaaS branch contains the unsimplified, full-fledged code for the Placemark product, which is a superset of Placemark-app and includes things like billing and account provisioning.

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Placemark could be useful to you if

• You need to edit, preview, create map data and want something similar to geojson.io, a project originally by the same author.
• You want to build a SaaS on this code. It is very liberally licensed. If you want to create a startup on this, you can.
• You want to extract patterns or modules from the codebase. It has implementations of many things in it.

Placemark is not

• An alternative to Mapbox GL, Maplibre, Deck.gl, etc: it uses Mapbox GL. It is a tool for editing maps, it uses existing tech to render the maps.
• A library you can use in your app. But you could possibly extract such a library from the codebase with a bit of time and effort.
• A product with customer support. It used to be, but is now an open source product mostly developed and maintained by Tom MacWright in his (my) free time.

placemark's Issues

Enable GitHub Actions tests

These I should be able to just pull from the closed-source project.

CLI

I think there's kind of a reasonable take that this should be in rust, with clap as the CLI parser.

Ability to pull / interact with OSM features

This was requested a few times and would be fun to add.

⚠️ Legal implications: OSM has a license and the community is extremely enthusiastic about enforcing it. Because Placemark has been about doing things The Nice Way, there should be a toast or another note that you may need to credit OSM.

Snapping between existing features during drawing

I work primarily with GIS data from water utilities, and ensuring all assets are connect correctly is important when drawing their assets. I’d almost always have snapping tools enabled in either QGIS or ArcGIS to connect features with each other during drawing or editing.

This is particularly important in the specialization I work in, which is hydraulic modeling (EPANET and SWMM). Modellers will import the GIS data to create a connected graph structure to simulate the network.

Have you considered including snapping support between layers in Placemark? Currently, I perform all my editing in desktop tools that support snapping. Here is an example of what I'm thinking of done in Mapbox GL Draw.

Part of the reason for my request is because I also maintain an open source web based version of a popular simulation library and potentially mixing it into a fork of Placemark seemed interesting to me.

Hide / reorder / freeze columns in the table view

Geodesic Tools

It would be nice to have some tools that worked with Geodesic's. My primary use case is drawing and measuring lines on the Geodesic between two points. https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/qgis-shapetools-plugin

https://placemark.canny.io/admin/board/feature-requests/p/geodesic-tools

Update to Prisma 5

Prisma is causing some havoc with Docker. Prisma 5 seems to cause less havoc, per reports, so it's worth switching.

In the long term, Drizzle almost strictly better than Prisma - no binary generation, faster, etc. But switching is a big task, so that's deferred.

Find/replace strings in the properties table

One of the many properties-table enhancements: it'd be nice to find & replace in the properties table: if you have lots of properties with some common mispelling, unifying NA and N/A for example, a traditional find/replace UI could be nifty.

I think this is mainly a UI/UX challenge: find & replace across properties is pretty simple to implement, but where to put this UI, and whether to support previewing or other more complex UIs is up to the implementer to decide.

Fix readme links

Most of the doc links in the readme were not updated since the monorepo changes.

Switch away from yarn

This uses yarn 1.x to install dependencies, which is pretty old and nobody uses it anymore. We should switch to npm or pnpm. Maybe pnpm.

The main issue to solve is that there's a lockfile keeping deps in place and once we upgrade to newly-resolved deps, we get:

 ⨯ Error [ERR_REQUIRE_ESM]: require() of ES Module /Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/@[email protected]/node_modules/@mapbox/tiny-sdf/index.js from /Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/@[email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected]/node_modules/@deck.gl/layers/dist/es5/text-layer/font-atlas-manager.js not supported.
Instead change the require of index.js in /Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/@[email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected]/node_modules/@deck.gl/layers/dist/es5/text-layer/font-atlas-manager.js to a dynamic import() which is available in all CommonJS modules.
    at mod.require (/Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/[email protected]_@[email protected][email protected][email protected]/node_modules/next/dist/server/require-hook.js:65:28)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/@[email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected]/node_modules/@deck.gl/layers/dist/es5/text-layer/font-atlas-manager.js:17:39)
    at mod.require (/Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/[email protected]_@[email protected][email protected][email protected]/node_modules/next/dist/server/require-hook.js:65:28)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/tmcw/p/placemark-oss/node_modules/.pnpm/@[email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected][email protected]/node_modules/@deck.gl/layers/dist/es5/text-layer/text-layer.js:32:49) {
  code: 'ERR_REQUIRE_ESM',
  page: '/map/zJ7HAtjokRyftNNmNEHiX'
}

This is upstream in deckgl/layers #7735.

Run free instance of /play

With protomaps it should be possible to run a /play instance with no server component, or a super lightweight one, and next-to-no tile costs.

Error in setup using Docker both in MacOS and Ubuntu

Used docker guide to setup the project. Getting an error. Tried both in Ubuntu and MacOS. Getting the same error as shown in the image.

Link to /play instance from placemark.io

Make CampaignMonitor API optional

This is probably one of the easiest to pluck out - campaignmonitor is used for list signups, not transactional email.

Update links

There are a few links that could be updated

• https://github.com/placemark links to https://www.placemark.io/
• https://www.placemark.io/ links to the broken URL https://www.placemark.io/replay/w/id-d4d6bfd0af15/:null/mp_/https://github.com/placemark/placemark-oss
• https://github.com/placemark/placemark links to https://www.placemark.io/

RFC: Split off saas branch

Proposal for simplifying Placemark:

• Create a branch called saas which contains the current main branch verbatim
• Continue to develop on main, but remove the components of Placemark dedicated to making it a SaaS. This means:
  • Integration with Stripe for billing.
  • Emails for trial ending, etc.
  • Quota system for how many maps can be created.

"Report a Vulnerability" link goes to 404 page on GitHub

Description:

In the page:
https://github.com/placemark/placemark/security

There is a link with the title "Report a Vulnerability"

When clicked on it brings you to a 404 page on Github
https://github.com/placemark/placemark/security/advisories/new

I notice there is no public Green "New Draft Security Advisory" button available as well

I am logged in with my normal Github account

Maplibre compatibility / transition

Right now, Placemark uses a combination of Mapbox GL JS and Deck.gl. I think this could use some freshening-up:

• Maplibre and Protomaps are probably the best combination for an open source project, since Maplibre is fully OSS.
• Deck.gl has been causing bugs in the app for a while and never got transitioned-to for anything more than rendering vertices. Moving away from Deck.gl would probably make sense.

The dream scenario would be implementing a diffing update pattern in Maplibre that was super efficient.

Dissolve operation

This was requested fairly often: it's slightly different than union.

TopoJSON supports dissolve:

• https://github.com/digidem/geojson-dissolve/blob/master/index.js
• https://github.com/mfogel/polygon-clipping/issues

Like other geometry-algorithm problems, it's important to find an implementation that has consistent behavior and no crasher bugs (with iterative geom algos those are more common than you'd expect).

faebook

Broken links in placemark-app/README.md

In a recent commit where the main README.md was split, some links in packages/placemark-app/README.md referencing repository files using relative paths were broken and need to be updated.

I've opened a PR to fix said broken links.

Upgrade to Next.js 14

Much upgrading. I think this is mostly a bugfix release with few breaking changes, but TBD:

https://nextjs.org/blog/next-14

Transfer key issues from Placemark repo?

There are some issues that might be informative here - or transformed into docs. Could have a list of known bugs / refactoring needs / etc.

Support for RTL text on the map

Hi,

The tables and JSON files work as expected when using RTL text format (in this case Hebrew), but when displayed on the map, they appear backwards.

Server-side versions

Feedback

From Matt Berg:

You might want to consider allowing you to download the original source used to create the map layer. I can see scenarios where I made edits to optimize for performance (eg. drop columns) but then would want to go back to the original to do something else with it.

Upgrade to TypeScript 5

Another just keeping-up-with-the-times upgrade.

Quickstart for deployment

It should be possible to do a quickstart for deployment on platforms that support it. This requires:

• A host that can do node
• Postgres

Potential options:

• Deploy to railway button: https://railway.app/button
• Deploy to render button: https://docs.render.com/deploy-to-render
• Guide for deploying to Fly?
• Others?

Probably Vercel isn't an option because no built-in Postgres?

Snap to roads / routing

Could use a routing API, TBD.

Geometry information not working on play.placemark.io

When trying to access Geometry Information after accessing a line, I get an error stating "please try again". This issue persisted across Firefox, GNOME Web (WebKit), and Chromium.

These are the console errors:

Screencast.from.2024-02-29.14-44-30.webm

Upgrade to mapbox-gl v3

Some yak-shaving required because it looks like deck.gl will require an upgrade as well.