Gtopo is a program for viewing the National Geographic Survey's
Topographic Map sets on a computer running linux
(or on a MAC running OS-X, or any computer with GTK).
I am not giving away the maps themselves, just providing an alternate piece of software. Gtopo uses GTK-2.0 and provides a simple and nice viewer for map images. The program was written in July of 2007 and is actively being developed. I am pleased if people download and use it and would be grateful to know how it works for them.
It now works quite well for viewing the TOPO! series files, and current development is focused on allowing it to obtain maps (and photos) from terraserver, which among other things, will make it useful for people who do not own TOPO! series collections (stay tuned!).
I just added public read access to the SVN repository at:
This is not actually the active repository, but a (hopefully) fairly up to date mirror of the repository (which is on another machine).The following link is where I have collected a lot of reference information. None of it is essential reading if you just want to use gtopo, but it should be of interest to people who want to learn about maps, GIS, gtopo internals, file formats, Terraserver, the USGS MRDS database and more!
You also may want to take a look at PyTopo which can be used to look at topo maps with other file formats.
Gtopo / tom@mmto.org