AutoRealm
I've told the story before: I started working on Krita because I got a graphics tablet and wanted to paint maps for a novel. Well, right now, I've got another reason to draw a map, to do with our ongoing fantasy roleplaying game soap (running for over a decade now gaming time, and about 35 years in-game time. And you know what? Krita isn't yet suitable for drawing maps with yet, although it's getting great for messing with photographs, sketching and painting.
And, actually, map-making software isn't all that close akin to a raster image editor. It's much closer to what Kivio or Karbon are. But there are also dedicated applications. Only one of them is free software software, that I could find: Andy Gryc's AutoREALM. This application started out as for-pay, windows-only Delphi application way back. Then it was open-sourced, and porting was started from Delphi to wx-widgets and C++, before Qt became free software on all main platforms.
Currently, there is some development going on using wxWidgets and Python, but there's not much to show for it. The Windows binary works fine under Wine, though, except for a couple of symbols. The Autorealm binary file format is neatly documented, but has since been superceded by an xml-based file format.
It's often the case that a big porting effort stalls, and then almost or completely kills an open source effort: in fact, I am having a hard time keeping Krita development keep its pace. We might have been too ambitious: port to Qt4 and KDE4, implement a layer model with non-destructive effects, painterly paint engine, recording, metadata, new memory management core, api and code structure refactoring, flake integration, tool system refactor... Maybe we should have been less ambitious, but then, we wouldn't have been able to release before KDE 4.1 was released anyway, and we're still aiming for a release this year. But for that, focus is needed!
And now I'm wondering how hard it would be to port the few features that are missing in the KOffice libraries, like the cute fractal vector painting tool and the random shape placement tool to KOffice and implement an AutoREALM compatible mapping application on top of KOffice and flake. It cannot be much work: we got shapes, vectors, bitmaps, text, text-on-a-path, units (though not days by sailed galley!), import/export, dockers, tool handling -- almost the lot.
The goal would, of course, be to produce maps like Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's city maps:
But first: focus!