• NOAA Marine Chart
    Tutorial

    NOAA Marine Chart Converter

    NOAA makes its marine charts available for free to the public, but those charts come in a BSB format. If you want to manipulate the marine charts on your computer, unless you hack the file, you have to use a computer program designed to read the BSB format. To make the charts usable in any graphics program or to print your own NOAA charts, you need to convert them from the native BSB format to a graphics format like PNG, JPEG or TIFF. In the past, you had to use NOAA’s somewhat confusing tool or a command-line hack. Bob Webster, feeling our pain, programed an open-source BSB converter. It converts…