On May 20th 2011 we are proud to announce that Geopublisher and AtlasStyler 1.7 have been released.

Geopublisher is a tool for geographers to create and publish maps without any knowledge of HTML, SLD, webservers etc. and AtlasStyler is a graphical interface to create OGC SLD/SE documents without the need of hacking any XML.

GP and AtlasStyler applications are translated into five languages: English, German, French, Turkish, Italian and Russian. In this release not all translations are updated. Translaters are asked to translate any new strings to we can make a full translated 1.7.1 release soon.

It has been half a year since version 1.6 has been released and we are very sorry for the delay - usually we want to make four releases a year. The following points mark some of the most important new features in this new version.

Geopublisher:

• Automatic on-line publishing on geopublishing.org:
  When exporting an atlas you may choose to publish your atlas on-line at http://atlas.geopublishing.org automatically without any technical setup. You may also choose to protect your atlas with a password. This new hosting feature is a free service for everybody without any guarante. For users wanting commercial support please contact us.

• New HTML editor:
  Thanks to the Glowa Jordan River project we have been able to include a new HTML editor into the Geopublisher application. The new editor provides spelling correction for more than 20 languages and has many new features like importing Microsoft Word layout.

• Rewrite of the "Personalize logos and icons" dialog. The new dialog can be found at Atlas -> Personalize Images. The user may now also define where on the map the maplogo should appear:

• Support for languages, that are not official ISO languages. This extension was sponsored by the www.cuvewaters.net project which does research in Central-Northern Namibia.

•  >90% Turkish translation thanks to Alişan Balkoca, PROGIS Yazılım
   
• Filter by search-word simplifies managing many entries in your data-pool or map-pool:

AtlasStyler 1.7 SLD/SE Editor:

AtlasStyler is an integrated part of Geopublisher which can be used as a stand-alone application. Most of these new features are also part of Geopublisher 1.7:

• New concept of "RulesLists"
  We introduced a new concept called RulesLists to allow the creation and management of very complex styles without losing the overview.
  A "RulesList" is a collection of SLD Rules that belong together semantically. For example a quantile classification is presented in SymbologyEncoding as multiple <sld:Rules>. For the AtlasStyler user these are presented as one RulesList. You may define multiple RulesLists in one style and define CQL filters or Min-/Max-Scales for each of them. Btw: You can copy any RulesList directly to the clipboard as a set of <sld:Rule> tags.
   
• Scale-dependency
  Every RulesList in AtlasStyler can now be limited to a specific scale range. To change the symbology while zooming into the map just define two RulesLists with different Min-/Max-Scales.
  
  
  This screenshot shows the new RulesList menu structure in AtlasStyler. Note that the GPS points are not labeled since the preview is zoomed out of the Max-Scale range for the labels. This is indicated by marking the "max-scale" column red. Also note that you can avoid entering any Min-/Max-Scale numbers manually by using the right-mouse context menu:

• Support for styling raster:
  Support to style one-band raster files (e.g. GeoTiff or ArcASCII). Two types of RuleLists are supported: "colors for distinct raster values" and "define value ranges to be painted in different colors". Both dialogs allow the definition of NODATA values which are mapped to transparency. Of course the raster styler also has support for scale-dependency and comes with all of ColorBrewers palettes included.

• A small new feature is to convert raster color palettes extracted by gdal to SLD: See this earlier blog for a description.
   
• Improved WFS compatibility:
  We had a hackfest with Andreas Schmitz and Markus Schneider of the deegree 3 development team to test and improve compatibility. We are happy that it now works to create SLDs with AtlasStyler using a deegree 3 WFS as a feature source:

Under the hood:

• New icons for the webpage and JavaWebStart making it clearer whether you are using a stable or testing release.
• geopublishing.org moved to a faster server

As always we are very happy to hear from you. If you have any questions, bug-reports or ideas contact us via the mailinglist.