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The roadbook editor

The roadbook editor lives in EpicRide (the desktop client) under the Roadbook tab. It is a WYSIWYG editor for rally roadbooks in the official FIA Diagram-1 page layout: what you edit on screen is, millimetre for millimetre, the page that prints — and everything you author exports as OpenRally GPX, the interchange format read by Piste Roadbook Reader, DMD2, Rally Navigator, TowerOne and friends.

Under the hood the editor never does roadbook math of its own: every edit round-trips the whole book through the server's roadbook engine — the same code that generates and bakes the TET books — so distances, close-note flags, waypoint radii and the lint findings are always authoritative.

Ways to start a book​

Everything goes through Open… (or the 📚 Library):

  • A generated roadbook — build one for any route or ride (📖 Roadbook → Generate on a track), then hit ✎ Edit. The full-resolution track comes along automatically.
  • A plain GPX — with no book open, the editor offers to start one on that track: a blank book (start + finish, you author the middle) or an auto-draft from shape (turn notes read from the track geometry alone — no map data needed).
  • An OpenRally GPX from another tool — detected automatically and imported as a book, zones and waypoint radii reconstructed, its embedded track attached.
  • A .roadbook.json — any FastGIS book, old or new (the server migrates), including the baked TET books.
  • A .roadbook-project.json — a saved workspace file (see Saving your work).

With a book already open, opening its plain .gpx attaches the full-resolution track — the map then follows the real road instead of the note-to-note chain, and the track tools light up.

The workspace​

Three panes, with draggable splitters between them:

  • The paper — the book as Diagram-1 rows (49.5 | 61.5 | 37 mm boxes, 36 mm tall) with the full colour law: red danger frames, green close-note boxes, orange speed-zone frames, waypoint fills, pink partials, comma decimals. Dragging the first splitter zooms the paper — proportions are never distorted.
  • The map — the route with numbered note markers, and a tool column: ⌖ identify (click anywhere on the route to jump to the note that owns that stretch), ＋ add note, ✥ move note (drag, snapping to the track), ✎ edit track (drag vertices, click the line to insert one, right-click to delete).
  • The panels — Lint (live findings with click-to-scroll), Note (the inspector for the selected note) and Book (metadata, page-1 waypoint radii, front matter, change tracking, zones, track tools).

Selecting a note anywhere — row, marker, lint finding — highlights the stretch of road it covers and syncs the other panes. Everything is undoable: ↶ / ↷ in the toolbar, or ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z.

Authoring flow: walk the route​

🚶 Walk the route (under the map) is the ride-it-at-the-desk flow. An amber cursor sits on the route; ▶ steps it forward (adjustable step, arrow keys work), ⏭ bend jumps straight to the next real turn, and ＋ Add note here (or Enter) drops a note at the cursor and opens its inspector. With auto ✨ on, each new note populates itself from the data underneath: the roadbook generator runs over the surrounding stretch and fills in the junction tulip, crossing roads, road name, surface, abbreviations, exit CAP and terrain stamps.

The ✨ Populate button in the inspector does the same for any note, in three flavours: OSM roads (full junction read), shape (generator) (turn read from the track), or shape (offline) (pure bearings, no network). Your own decisions — waypoint type, a danger level you set, CAP, text, stamped symbols — always survive a populate.

For the regulation "no box longer than 400 m" fill, use Re-split boxes (Book tab): it inserts evenly spaced continue notes with average CAPs into every over-long gap, without ever touching the notes you placed.

Editing a note​

The Note inspector covers the whole vignette:

  • Danger — the — / ! / !! / !!! control (the paper picks up the red frames and underlines per the FIA rules; a !!! without a safety waypoint is a lint warning, per FIM 80.11.4).
  • Waypoint — the official FIM/FIA types (WPV…WPS, DSS/ASS, DZ/FZ, CP…) with regulation radii; custom radii mark the note override.
  • CAP — heading value and kind (exit / average / calculated / oblic).
  • Tulip — edit the diagram itself: click a handle (entry, exit, or any branch), then click where it should point; add and remove crossing branches, set per-branch surface (tarmac draws the double line, off-piste the dashed one).
  • Symbols — stamp from the full 144-symbol lexicon, organised in the nine official categories, with the four abbreviation dialects (FIM-EN / FIA-2020 / FR-2007 / IT-FMI).
  • Name and free text for the description box.

Book-level structure lives in the Book tab: zones (painting a speed zone fills the speed rings and stamps DZ/FZ), the page-1 waypoint radii table, the front matter (event block, distances, contacts — printed as the cover page) and change tracking: arm it with a version label and every subsequent edit is flagged MODIF (inserts NEW NOTE) and logged — the official opening-car change workflow, printed on the cover.

Track tools​

With the full-resolution track loaded (Book tab → Track):

  • ⇢ Snap to OSM — map-matches the whole track onto the road network and shows the proposal as a dashed green line with match statistics; stretches with no OSM keep their original geometry. Accept or discard.
  • Re-measure distances — the explicit act of making the track the ground truth: every distance recomputes from the geometry, behind a confirmation showing the before/after totals. (By default authored distances are never silently rewritten — they are usually truer than a GPX chord sum.)
  • Re-snap notes — moves each note onto the track (within 100 m) without touching any distance.
  • ⬇ track GPX — export the current track.

Saving your work​

  • 💾 Save stores the book as a library item — the same Library that holds your routes and rides. The first save opens the library's save form (name, tags, description); after that it saves in place. A saved roadbook is a record like any other: it shows up in Library under the roadbook category, can be shared, exported as GPX (the track it is projected onto), searched by name or tag, and it links back to the track it was generated from. An amber ● on the title means the library hasn't seen your latest changes, and every action that would discard them asks first.
  • Books saved before roadbooks joined the library appear under 📚 Library in a "saved before…" strip; opening one moves it into the library — nothing is lost and nothing needs doing in advance.
  • Generate writes the book. Hitting Generate on a TET trail, an imported GPX or any saved track writes that track's roadbook to your library straight away (the ✓ in library chip opens it). Regenerating the same track replaces that auto-written book; a book you have edited and saved in the editor is never overwritten — a regenerate is filed beside it as a new copy that links back to yours.
  • Provenance travels with the file. Every generated book carries a provenance block: the library item and external origin the track came from, the generator settings, the track's length, point count and a fingerprint of its geometry, and when it was made. It survives editing, the project file and the library, and the OpenRally export writes it into the GPX's standard metadata (desc, time, keywords), so another tool — or you, a year later — can find the original data from the file alone.
  • ⬇ project downloads the same workspace as a portable .roadbook-project.json — email it, archive it, or Open… it on another machine.

Getting it out​

  • ⬇ Export OpenRally GPX — the interchange file for phone readers and other roadbook tools. Drawings go as PNG by default (what the reader ecosystem renders); the full track is embedded.
  • 🖨 Print — the FIA print book in a new tab, ready for File → Print: A5 (5 rows/page), FMI (8 rows, black-square index) or the continuous moto-roll with cut marks — led by the page-1 cover with your front matter, the day's waypoint radii and the change log.

A note on the standard​

The editor follows the FIA Diagram-1 layout as measured from the FIA CCSR 2020 appendix — including details like danger marks living in the diagram box and the E3/QT/-V abbreviations printing red there and black in the description. The rider app's roadbook view uses its own larger-type display style over the same data; the page you edit, print and export is the official one.