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Thanks for checking out Profile Maker! My goal is to provide some working software to produce quality guide books for hiking trails. My favorite style is waypoints plotted on an elevation profile. Certainly this needs a particular type of trail. It needs to be really well marked so that navigation doesn't require maps. And of course, it needs to have elevation change.

My initial project is the New England Trail, which I'm hosting on my site: http://parkshikes.com. There are four parts to developing a guide.

1. Data collection and annotation. The track needs to be obtained and waypoints recorded of all trail features to annotate in the guide
2. Data formatting and validation. The track needs to be cleaned up to remove breaks and trips off the route. The waypoints need to have the text of the annotation and other useful information encoded in.
3. Generate the profile images. This is where my script comes in. It will plot all the points and give you some stylistic control.
4. Create supplementary pages. There is probably information you want to include in your book that isn't easily shown on an elevation plot. Use your favorite Desktop Publishing software (like the free software Scribus) to generate these pages.

After that it's just a matter of stitching them together in a pdf and hosting it out there for everyone to see. I'm providing this effort for free and I hope you can continue in that spirit by sharing your guide for free too. I'd be happy to host it on my site and give you credit for providing the data as well.