From map to GPS: exporting your track as GPX, KML and XML
A track design that lives only in a browser tab is a sketch. The moment it leaves — onto a GPS in your pocket, into Google Earth's 3D terrain, into a GIS package or a modding pipeline — it becomes a document, and documents are what convince people, survive laptops, and turn ideas into projects. RaceTrackDesigner exports every design in three formats, and each one exists because it does a job the other two can't. This is a short, complete guide to which file to reach for and why.
The mechanics first, because they take one sentence: open the Settings menu and choose your export, or just press X for XML, G for GPX, or K for KML. The file downloads instantly — generated in your browser, touching no server, because the app stores nothing. Now, the interesting part: what each file is for.
GPX: your track, in the real world, under your feet
GPX is the GPS Exchange Format — the plain, universal language of GPS hardware and apps, built from timestamped-or-not track points in latitude and longitude. Your export contains the sequence of points along your circuit's centreline, which means practically everything that speaks GPS can display it: handheld Garmins, bike computers, hiking and running apps, drone flight planners, surveying tools, and any GIS software ever written.
The killer use case is ground-truthing. If your design sits on land you can access — a farm parcel you're eyeing for a kart track, the local roads of a would-be rally stage — load the GPX onto your phone and physically walk or drive the layout. Satellite imagery flattens the world; your feet do not. The dip that will need drainage, the sightline a hedge blocks, the corner that's on more of a slope than the screen suggested — a GPX walk finds all of it in an hour, and it is by a wide margin the cheapest site survey in existence. GPX is also the polite handoff format: surveyors, engineers, and mapping professionals can pull it straight into their tools without asking you a single question.
KML: your track in Google Earth, for the people you need to convince
KML is Google Earth's native language, and this is the export you use when the audience is human. Open the file in Google Earth (double-click on desktop, or import it in the web version) and your circuit appears draped over 3D terrain and photorealistic imagery. Tilt the view, orbit your Turn 1, follow the lap at rooftop height across real hills and real buildings. It is, frankly, the glamour format — and glamour has a function: a council officer, a landowner, a business partner, or a sceptical spouse will feel a KML flyover in a way no top-down diagram achieves. The layout stops being an abstraction and becomes a thing that visibly exists right there.
There's a pleasing symmetry to this workflow if you arrived at track design by trying to draw a circuit in Google's own tools: design in a tool built for track geometry, then return to Google Earth for what it does best — making geography beautiful. Use each for its half of the job.
XML: the machine-readable record of the design itself
The XML export is the app's own format, and it captures what the geographic formats deliberately don't: the design as a design. Alongside every waypoint coordinate, it records the format (circuit or point-to-point), the vehicle class the analysis ran with, the length, the corner count, the character rating, the key speeds, and the estimated lap or stage time. Think of it as the datasheet: one self-contained file that states both what the track is and how it performs.
That makes XML the format for record-keeping and for feeding other software. Archive one per design iteration and you have a version history of your project — a folder of datasheets showing the lap time falling as the layout improved. Parse it in a script if you're the type (it's clean, human-readable XML). And note the complementary tool for a different job: if the goal is handing someone the editable design rather than the record of it, press S instead — the share link encodes the entire design, widths and turn labels included, and opens ready to edit in anyone's browser. Files are for machines and archives; the link is for collaborators.
Where the exports lead next
These files are also on-ramps. GPX and KML are first-class citizens in the GIS world (QGIS opens both directly), which matters the moment a project gets serious enough to involve parcel boundaries, elevation models, or planning submissions. And for sim racers, a geographic export of a tested layout is the natural starting reference for the modding pipeline — the tools that turn real-world locations into driveable Assetto Corsa tracks, which we compared in our track design software roundup, all begin from exactly this kind of geographic truth. Design and validate the layout where iteration is instant; then carry the file to the tool that builds the 3D world. That pipeline deserves a walkthrough of its own, and it's on our list.
The habit to build is simple: when a design reaches "actually good," export it. GPX if it might ever meet the ground, KML if it needs to impress someone, XML for the archive, and the share link for anyone who'll want to argue with your corner choices. Thirty seconds of keystrokes — G, K, X, S — and the design exists everywhere it needs to. Open the designer, finish something worth keeping, and set it free.