Pedometer, by Paul Degnan, allows the tracing of routes on Google maps. The maps are very good, and if care is taken to follow roads closely, the resulting route will be accurate. Josh Larios has implemented a utility, called GPSToGPX, which will transform the Pedometer routes into gpx files: gpx is intended to be a standard for transmitting GPS information.

The GPSToGPX utility may be copied as a bookmark, and by clicking on it, whenever a Pedometer route is displayed, the route will be translated into a gpx file. At present, there is no file save for the gpx text, but it is a simple matter to cut and paste it into a program like Notepad which can save it. It may be saved either as a .txt file or as a .gpx file. Those of you who use Internet Explorer as your browser, will have to make a small fix to the .gpx text in Notepad before saving. You should search the text for the ‘¢’ sign and replace it with ‘&cent’. As far as I know, this only occurs once in the file, but if it is not fixed, CueSheetMaker will not be able to load the file.

CueSheetMaker will take the file and produce a cue sheet. CueSheetMaker can judge the degree of turns and can take the more extreme turns as via’s, but not all large turns are at intersections, and the resulting cue sheet will disappoint. To overcome this, a hack may be used. At each interesting turn, make a small excursion out and back to let CueSheetMaker know that this is a waypoint and should appear as a line on the cue sheet. The following figure illustrates the hack:

At a waypoint, double click off the road to draw a line and then double click on the original point again. CueSheetMaker will discard the extra point when it makes cue sheets. It is best to click at an angle to the route in order to make it easier to find the original point to re-click. The re-clicked point must coincide with the original point.

As an example, the following Edit cue sheet was obtained from Pedometer and GMapToGPX:

Alas, there are no road names; however, the turns faithfully follow the hacks, and the distances are correct. After inserting names, and adjusting two BL close calls, the cue sheet appears as:

When drawing a route with Pedometer or any program that needs turn names, I find it useful to arrange my screen so that the drawing is on the left and the first column of EXCEL on the right, as illustrated below. As I mark a turn in the drawing, I note the name in EXCEL. When the time comes to edit the cue sheet, I simply copy the names in the EXCEL column in Book 1 into the first column of the Edit Cue Sheet provided by CueSheetMaker. If I have been careful, the names will exactly correspond to turns.