Freeing NEPTUN's maps
Map tiles can be used for things other than maps. High resolution paintings are one example. NEPTUN provides a wealth of old maps, and other documents, but doesn't allow you to download them as whole files. This script, named Poseiden, does.
The University of Namur’s library has some wonderful building, local, regional and national maps on their NEPTUN site. They provide a Google Map like pan and zoom functionality using a commercial Flash program called Zoomify. It’s unfortunate they chose to pay for functionality that’s freely available from OpenLayers or Leaflet. Regardless of this the data is not downloadable as a large file. I do not see why data such as this is not made easily and freely available. As a University it seems that it should be encouraging the sharing of past knowledge. In order to help them, and because a colleague asked me for a map, I have created a script that downloads all the tiles and reorganize them into one image.
The script and instructions are on github. Get Poseidon on github
I created another script to get tiles from other providers - this one requires a bit more work to use though and I’ve moved on to other things. Check out PosMos on github