Download free maps from Google maps using Perl

The following is a step-by-step guide for downloading google maps to your harddisk and open it with your favourite image viewer.

Requirements:
1. Internet connection
2. Perl installed in your machine (Windows version available from http://www.activestate.com/store/freedownload.aspx?prdGuid=81fbce82-6bd5-49bc-a915-08d58c2648ca) In fact, you can use any scripting language you are conmfortable in.
3. Download wget executabel (Free windows version at http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/cgi-bin/fetch.pl?dl=wget/wget.exe )
4. Irfanview image application (Free version at http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm)

Procedure:
1. First go to http://maps.google.com and browse to the location you want to see.Move around in the map and in the bottom status window, you will see some thing like this:
http://mt3.google.com/mt?n=404&w=2.69&hl=en&x=54&y=108&zoom=9
2. Note this down. The value for x and y will depend on the location that you have browsed. The value of "zoom" will depend on your current zoom level. Also note down the values at the four corners of the area that you want to make a map of. Lets say thay are x varies from 1072 to 1090 and y varies from 600 to 900.
3. Using notepad open a file and type the following lines into it. Modify the $x1, $x2, $y1, $y2 ,$zoom and $step variables from step 2. Also modify the wget statement with the values of "n" and "w" from step 1:

#-------------------------------------
$x1=1072;
$x2=1090;
$y1=600;
$y2=900;
$zoom = 9;
$step = 1 ;
for($j=$y1;$j<=$y2;$j++) {
for($i=$x1;$i<=$x2;$i++) {
`wget -O $j.$i.png "http://mt3.google.com/mt?n=404&w=2.69&hl=en&x=$i&y=$j&zoom=$zoom"` ;
}
}
#-------------------------------------


4. Copy the "wget.exe" to the same directory as the above file.
5. Open command prompt , go to the same directory and type:
perl
6. The Perl will run and download all the images as small small tiles.
7. Open irfanview. Choose "Files->Thumbnails"
8. In the thumbnails window, choose all the png files which were downloaded earlier. Right click and choose "Create content sheet..."
9. In the dialog box, enter the image width , height etc using the values used above.
For eg, image width = (1090-1072+1)*256
image height = (900-600+1)*256
column width = (1090-1072+1)
row = (900-600+1)
Chooe spacing as 0.
10. Create the output, and that is your map file !!!!!