I want to browse a city map offline, what are my options?

Question

I found exports on http://download.bbbike.org/ and http://metro.teczno.com/

But it's not tiles, so it's not really usable unless I render it.

Are there software where I can browse openstreetmap.org tiles, but completely offline, for a small region ? Not editing, just browsing and maybe searching streets.

Any software which allows me to generate those tiles I want using those exports, and another software to browse tiles ?

I don't have a smartphone, I don't have a GPS, but I have a computer and an internet access, but sometimes I don't have a fast enough internet access, so I wonder why I can't find any way to host a limited set of tile map data...

I guess you could create a search index on smaller areas on a local computer if you give it enough time...

Does JOSM has a viewing mode ? garmin and qlandkarte seems to just be tools to transfer data to GPS devices.

Answer 1

Selfrendering for smaller regions is easy with maperitive. The result almost looks like original Openstreetmap tiles.

For browsing, Openlayers is all you need. Instead of fetching online tiles, you can supply an adress on disk using file:///, or use a local apache server to use http://localhost.

Qlandkarte is also able to load locally stored tiles using the same localhost. Furthermore, it also can load Garmin vector maps build from OSM data. That allows you to zoom in much further than with tiles, and get additional information on mouseclick.

Garmin BaseCamp can also be used to read osm-based Garmin vector maps. And allows for searching and routing.

Answer 2

one option is to download the osm data for the required country and view it uisng QGIS ... you might want to refer to this link ..

How do I load OSM vector data in QGIS 2.x?