<preface id="Introduction">
   <title>Introduction to GPSBabel</title>
   <section id="The_Problem">
      <title>The Problem: Too many incompatible GPS file formats</title>
      <para>There are simply too many gratuitously different file formats
to hold waypoint, track, and route information in various programs
used by computers and GPS receivers.

         <ulink url="http://www.topografix.com/gpx.asp">GPX</ulink>
         defines a
standard in XML to contain all the data, but there are too many
programs that don't understand it yet and too much data in
alternate formats.</para>
      <para>Perhaps you have an
         <link linkend="fmt_magellanx">Explorist 600</link>
         and your friend has a
         <link linkend="fmt_garmin">StreetPilot 2720</link>
         .
You've collected a list of your favorite locations as waypoints and you'd
like to be able to share them.  Unfortunately, his copy of
         <link linkend="fmt_gdb">Garmin Mapsource</link>
         won't read data created by your copy of
         <link linkend="fmt_tpg">National Geographic Topo</link>
         .  What you need
is a program that converts data between the two programs.</para>
      <para>GPSBabel actually solves that problem for you and much more...
</para>
   </section>
   <section id="The_Solution">
      <title>The Solution</title>
      <para>The original author of GPSBabel,
         <ulink url="/people/robertlipe.html">Robert Lipe</ulink>
         , needed to convert waypoints between a couple of formats, so he
whipped up a converter and designed it upon an extensible foundation so
that it was easy to add new formats and made the program freely available.
         <ulink url="/people/index.html">Many others</ulink>
         have contributed to the program since then.</para>
      <para>Most file formats added so far have taken under 200
   lines of reasonable ISO C so they can be stamped
   out pretty trivially.  Formats that are ASCII text delimited in some
   fixed way can be added with no programming at all via our

         <link linkend="Styles">style</link>
         mechanism.</para>
   </section>
</preface>
