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None of the "openlayers offline" examples I've found seem to have an even remote understanding of what someone asking for an offline solution means. I don't want a browser cache, and I don't want an intranet server. This is for a demonstration (of a finished, mostly unrelated system) for academic purposes that needs to all run on one computer with no access to the internet. I had already built the entire demo using GoogleMaps before I found out about the requirement that it works always-offline.

So, as specifically as I can be at my current level of understanding of this system: I want to be able to download a tileset representative of a portion of the real world (a small to medium-sized area at a single zoom level is fine; I'm not trying to download the entire planet), be able to associate that tileset with a known latitude/longitude range, and then use that tileset to build a small map without trying to poll from the web at runtime. It needs to all be on the same (non-Mobile-OS) computer.

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When you say "I don't want an intranet server", it's not clear to me if you are excluding the possibility of running a server system on the local machine. In principle there's nothing wrong with doing that, and no internet connection is needed - for example you could run Tilestache on the exact same machine.

You could for example take subsets of raw OSM data from Geofabrik, use Tilemill to render custom map tiles from the data into an "mbtiles" file, and then use Tilestache to serve them.

If you're happy with the standard OSM tile format, you would probably want to get hold of them rather than render your own tiles from raw data, but I don't know the simple way to do that - maybe someone else can answer for that.

Dan Stowell
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    I can't up-vote because I'm too new, but this sounds good to me. I'll still need to figure out how to poll from tilestache instead of their servers (because I seem to be automatically polling from their servers without once specifying a website to poll from in my code... it seems to all be done in the built-in openlayers code), but it's not like I expect you to walk me through that. This is almost definitely the answer I was looking for. –  Jun 12 '13 at 13:06
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    (well, I upvoted after I got the rep! I ended up needing raw data from a different, more comprehensive, source, but the two programs you offered worked perfectly. So really, thanks so much.) –  Jun 14 '13 at 20:50